A rchive Date
[ 27-10-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://msnbc.com/news/985493.asp?0cv=CB20
NAFTA is back - as a scapegoat
With unemployment rate up, Democrats blame trade pact
By Mark Murray
NBC NEWS Oct. 27 2003.
WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 - In the darkness of the night a week ago, just after finishing his fourth and final debate against Republican challenger Haley Barbour, Democratic Mississippi Gov. Ronnie Musgrove hopped on an 18 - wheeler to embark on a four - day, statewide tour promoting his economic agenda. During stops at power, steel and aluminum plants across the state, Musgrove argued that his plans for targeted tax incentives and workforce development would bring more jobs to Mississippi.
BUT ON THIS tour, which ended Friday, he also took aim at an issue that some thought had been resolved 10 years ago: The North American Free Trade Agreement. According to Musgrove, NAFTA and other free - trade agreements have eliminated 41,000 manufacturing jobs in the state. His message on his aptly named “Don’t Mess With Our Jobs Tour” was simple: He wants to attract new jobs but also keep the ones Mississippi already has. He took the tour “to make sure the voters of this state know that I won’t let anyone mess with our jobs,” he said.
Indeed, in his neck - and - neck battle for governor that will be decided Nov. 4, Musgrove has made attacking NAFTA - and also Barbour, by association - a central theme in this race. In his speech to kick off his campaign, Musgrove said, “While we’ve been working together day and night to increase jobs in Mississippi, Haley aggressively supported that bad trade deal called NAFTA, and was later even paid by the government of Mexico to ensure south of the border success in the deal.”
The actual debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement, of course, occurred in the early 1990s. The Clinton administration and other supporters said the trade pact would bring prosperity to the United States, Canada, and Mexico, while opponents said it would create a sound - “a giant sucking sound,” as Ross Perot put it - of American jobs fleeing to Mexico.
However, when the trade accord passed Congress in 1993, and when the economy not only didn’t falter but began to hum like never before, the criticism of NAFTA largely disappeared from the political landscape. In fact, Congress later went on to approve permanent normal trade relations with China and gave President Bush fast - track trade authority. Free trade had prevailed.
But with an unemployment rate now hovering at 6 percent and with an economy still struggling to produce more jobs, people say they’re once again hearing that giant sucking sound. And it’s just not in Mississippi. NAFTA has become an issue in this year’s gubernatorial race in Kentucky, and experts say that it also will be a political lightning rod next year in states where textile and manufacturing industries have a large presence. “You are going to see it all over the South,” said Jennifer Duffy, who analyzes gubernatorial and U.S. Senate contests for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “It’s definitely going to be out there.”
DISSED BY THE DEMS
And most of the Democratic presidential candidates either seem to be attacking NAFTA or backing away from it. Rep. Dick Gephardt, D - Mo., recently aired an ad in Iowa proudly announcing that he “led the fight against NAFTA” in Congress. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D - Ohio, says that his first act as president would be to cancel the trade accord. Moreover, although he supported NAFTA when he was governor of Vermont, Howard Dean went out of his way on ABC’s “This Week” to deny he was ever a “strong” supporter of that accord, even though he actually said he was during a 1995 appearance on that show.
Meanwhile, Sen. John Kerry, D - Mass., says it would be disastrous to cancel NAFTA, but he argues that it needs to be fixed. And although he wasn’t in Congress when NAFTA was passed, Sen. John Edwards, D - N.C., recently voted against free - trade agreements with Chile and Singapore. In fact, Sen. Joe Lieberman, D - Conn., appears to be the only major Democratic candidate who has loyally stood by NAFTA and free trade.
What’s going on here? Well, one obvious reason for the backlash against NAFTA is the current economic climate. Even though its supporters say that free trade with Canada and Mexico has led to cheaper products in the United States and free - market reforms in Mexico, it is also true that NAFTA has eliminated American jobs. According to Robert E. Scott, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, NAFTA resulted in the loss of nearly 800,000 U.S. jobs from 1993 to 2000. Other economists, however, say the number is much smaller than that.
DIFFERENT ECONOMIES
Yet due to the booming economy of the late 1990s, Scott says, those displaced workers were able to find other jobs. But in today’s stagnant job market, it’s much harder for them to do that. “These are ... working - class guys who saw their jobs go down to Mexico,” said Democratic Governors Association spokeswoman Nicole Harburger.
But Robert Litan, a trade expert who works for both the Kauffman Foundation and the Brookings Institution, argues that NAFTA is more of a scapegoat than a job killer. “It’s absolutely a complete red herring,” he said, “When times aren’t good, it’s always easy to blame foreigners.” Indeed, according to Musgrove’s opponent, Haley Barbour, that’s exactly what is going on in Mississippi. “NAFTA’s an issue in this race because the governor injected it into the campaign to try to use it as a smokescreen to hide his record on jobs,” Barbour said in a September debate with Musgrove.
As for the Democratic presidential candidates’ criticism of NAFTA, something else seems to be at play: winning the nomination. Dan Griswold, a trade policy analyst at the conservative Cato Institute, points out that labor unions and environmentalists - both of which tend to be very critical of free trade - play an important role in the presidential primaries that will select the eventual Democratic nominee. And so it’s not surprising, he says, to see these candidates distance themselves from NAFTA and other free - trade agreements.
But in Mississippi, there’s another reason why Musgrove is campaigning against NAFTA: It’s a shrewd way for him to attack Barbour’s past work as one of Washington’s most powerful lobbyists. As Musgrove has pointed out throughout the race, the Mexican government paid Barbour’s lobbying firm $35,000 a month to assist it implementing NAFTA. And Musgrove pounced on that connection. “Haley wasn’t around to see the devastation NAFTA brought to Mississippi - the lost jobs, the empty factories,” Musgrove said in a July speech. “Mississippi can do better than a candidate that puts Mexico before Mississippi.”
‘SILLY’ CHARGE
Barbour argues that charge is “silly.” He says he had no role whatsoever in helping to pass NAFTA; his work on implementing the trade accord was to simply help Mexican trucks enter the United States, and that occurred well after the trade accord passed Congress in 1993. Nevertheless, the Musgrove campaign has pointed to Barbour’s past statements supporting NAFTA’s passage.
Despite all of the anti - NAFTA rhetoric, the Cato Institute’s Griswold isn’t so sure that NAFTA and trade are potent political issues. “Trade is more talked about than actually acted upon in the political arena,” he said. Americans “have other things that affect them more directly. Education. Health care. Taxes. [Trade] is item No.14 on their list of worries.”
But don’t tell that to Musgrove. For him, trade has become a way to channel his voters’ frustrations about the economy - and at the same time to take a jab at his opponent. And if Musgrove’s attack on NAFTA pays off, you can be sure that many more politicians will begin to hear that giant sucking sound.
Mark Murray is a political reporter for NBC News. NBC’s Steve O’Mara contributed to this article.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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