Deseret News – by Tom Baxtern Nov. 21 1993
“He can take his’n and beat your’n,” someone once said of Coach Bear Bryant, “and he can take your’n and beat his’n.” After the stunning House passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement on Wednesday, Bill Clinton deserves to have the same thing said of him.
The new president’s second big victory in Congress could not have been more dissimilar to his first, the narrow passage of the budget package back in August. That first win was accomplished without a single Republican vote; Wednesday’s victory was a bipartisan wonder, maneuvered through the House with Rep. Newt Gingrich riding shotgun. His’n and your’n, indeed.For Gingrich, who is seeking to establish his bona fides as minority leader-in-waiting, this was also a big win. But those Republicans who argued in advance of the vote that Gingrich’s prominent role demonstrated Clinton’s weakness were blowing smoke.
What clinched the victory was the psychological opening that was gained when Vice President Al Gore got the better of Ross Perot in a television faceoff. Overnight, the balance of calls to congressional offices tilted from decidedly anti-NAFTA to about even, and a number of fence-sitting House members found the cover they needed to go for the treaty.
The White House played this high-stakes all the way, and a great deal was made – just as it was before the August budget vote – of how damaged Clinton’s presidency would be both at home and abroad if he failed.
In that respect, this fight was like Jimmy Carter’s passage of the Panama Canal treaties. That was a bipartisan effort also, with Howard Baker playing the part of chief Republican accomplice. But if losing the Panama Canal vote would have been a disaster for Carter, winning it never did him much good either.
For all the belated enthusiasm he worked up for this treaty, Clinton has to have some of the same concerns.
He has to patch things up with the unions and hope that NAFTA is as good for the economy as Lee Iacocca says it will be. But the greater worry may have to do with those whom he has seemingly, for the moment at least, made monkeys of.
A persistent theme of last year’s presidential campaign was that the Democrats and Republicans have become indistinguishable, and the real parties consist of those inside the Washington Beltway and those outside it.
That distinction was never made more sharply – if inadvertently – than in the pro-NAFTA commercial that showed all the former presidents, a list of former secretaries of state and Colin Powell, all of whom favored the treaty, contrasted with a quartet of NAFTA opponents: Perot, Jesse Jackson, Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader.
It was a brilliantly effective ad, for NAFTA. But by lumping together the champions of the radicalized middle, left, right and sideboard of American politics, the ad may have helped some Americans to realize for the first time that they have something in common.
TREASON-Period.