The answer: Ross Perot. It was time, said Gore, to take him on. Gore would challenge the richest and most annoying critic of NAFTA to a debate on “Larry King Live.” They could raise the stakes and deflate Perot, Gore told the president. With luck, the Texas billionaire might even become unhinged, the way he had on “Meet the Press,” when reporters cornered him with demands for specifics he couldn’t provide. Within minutes of Clinton’s assent, Gore was on the line to King. After a day of name-calling and jockeying between the administration and the Texan, it was agreed: Gore versus Perot. live for 90 minutes on Tuesday night.
It is a risky strategy, but the White House is approaching the point of desperation. The decision was prompted, in part, by the election results. They underscored an essential point: a year after he was elected by campaigning as an outsider promising change, Clinton hasn’t made a dent in voters’ disgust with the political establishment. And to a greater degree than the president has acknowledged–or perhaps realized–NAFTA is in danger of being dismissed by voters as just another bill of goods being peddled by elites-editorial writers, economists, corporate lawyers, to name a few–that voters despise.
Voters showed last week that they want to dismantle whatever establishments are close at hand–and shake up the political system as a whole. In New York City, they elected a tough-talking Republican, Rudolph Giuliani (page 37), ending two generations of bipartisan allegiance to big-city liberalism. More astonishing in a city that believed in politics and government, voters endorsed term limits. In New Jersey, voters threw out the tax-raising Democratic governor, Jim Florio-but also sent a warning to the winner, Republican Christine Todd Whitman, by approving a recall mechanism. In Virginia, Republican George Allen won the governorship by denouncing 12 years of Democratic state rule. “Attacks on the governing class are increasing,” says analyst Kevin Phillips. “The politicians are just lucky that incarceration wasn’t on any ballot anywhere.”
Clinton rode in on that same wave a year ago, schooled in stoking anti-establishment resentment by strategist James Carville and polltaker Stan Greenberg. It is revealing that these political pros have always doubted the salability of NAFTA. During the campaign they counseled Clinton to oppose it. With Carville and Greenberg on the sidelines (Carville also was busy, advising Florio), most of the strategy has been concocted by White House insiders, who have pursued what at times has amounted to a parody of an insiders’ game.
Clinton has consorted with every establishment figure he can find. He launched the NAFTA drive earlier in the fall in front of a chorus line of three former presidents–with Ronald Reagan, the only recent president to have served two full terms, conspicuous by his absence. He trotted out Colin Powell and a group of Nobel laureates last week. Opposed by Big Labor, Clinton has been forced to line up with every corporate CEO he can find, including Lee Iacocca and Bill Gates.
White House advisers argue that the president can win if he frames NAFTA as a grand foreign-policy issue. The economic case is a far harder sell. Most voters, Greenberg says, assume that trade costs jobs. So Clinton picked allies in the foreignpolicy establishment–the people Harry Truman derided as “the striped-pants boys.” On Election Day, Clinton surrounded himself with former secretaries of state–an ironically inappropriate tableau given the mood of voters going to the polls on that same day. “Everyone who has ever worn a morning coat is for NAFTA,” says Democratic polltaker Harrison Hickman. “That’s not a good message.”
Privately, most members recognize NAFTA’s virtues. “If people were voting their conscience, this thing would pass handily,” says Rep. Jim Kolbe, a NAFTA supporter. But conscience doesn’t have much to do with it. Wavering Democrats are intimidated by unions that have threatened to withhold financial support; Republicans by the Perotians. Rep. David Levy, a freshman Republican from New York’s Baldwin and a free trader at heart, was inundated by nasty mail when he said nice things about NAFTA on cable TV. Now he’s leaning–heavily listing–against.
To gain votes, the White House has shilled with almost comic eagerness in the House, offering goodies to all. One Hispanic member won the promise of a new “inter-American” bank. (“One bank, one vote,” joked one White House official.) Louisianans got help for sugar, Floridians for citrus. Pure pork, quite unrelated to trade, is on the menu, too. “Somebody told me I could get a bridge built in my district,” Levy recalls. “But I have no water here.”
The administration voices confidence but remains short of votes. Chicago lawyer Bill Daley, supervising the stroking and armtwisting, claims 77 Democrats solid, with 40 to 50 undecideds or leaners. The goal of getting at least 100 Democrats is fading. To win the 218 total House votes they need, the White House is increasingly relying on the kindness of strangers: they may need as many as 125 of the 176 House Republicans.
And ranged against “the striped-pants boys” is an army of nearly every self-proclaimed populist of the air-waves: Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson, Jerry Brown, Paul Weyrich and Pat Buchanan. Perot has been busy. He’s done 92 rallies in 43 states. His followers aren’t subtle. Though beset by internal squabbles, they are churning out letters that land with a thud on the desks of members. “The last thing that you personally need,” reads one sent to Rep. Scott McInnis, a NAFTA supporter from Colorado, “will be our members in every mall in your district, reminding voters that you voted to send their jobs to Mexico….This is not a threat, but a promise.”
In a way, Perot has already won, if NAFTA passes, he’ll be at every factory closing blaming Washington; if the treaty fails, he’ll claim credit. But Clinton and Gore are gambling that Perot can become their unwitting ally: the anti-NAFTA demon with which to scare a skittish Congress. Perot’s not popular: a new CNN-Gallup poll shows his “negatives” near the level they reached after he suddenly quit the 1992 presidential race.
Clinton strategists hope to use Perot’s notoriety to shift the political dynamic. Right now, legislators are lining up with the talkshow throngs against the elites. By making an issue of Perot, Clinton wants members of Congress to feel even more threatened by the Texas billionaire and his mob, now clamoring outside the political gates. Basically, the pitch to congressmen invented by the president and his veep last week boils down to this: if NAFTA loses, we all could lose, swept away by the tide of public anger.
