Word: naftas
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...first Clinton Cabinet. But the President wanted a team that looked like America, and despite a smile as wide as the Illinois prairie and feet firmly in the heartland, Daley didn't fit the bill. But Daley looked enough like America to be asked to salvage NAFTA in 1993, when the Administration was headed for an embarrassing defeat. The job was a killer. It lacked Cabinet status, had no staff and had less than a third of the Democrats in support. He jumped right in. Former U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor remembers that even before Daley had a desk...
...mind anyway, is the sullen desperation of the excluded. Excluded from what? The festival of the Nasdaq, the great gated community of the Bobos, the money fair. Teamster Hoffa all but endorses the Green Party's Nader as a friend of American labor and an enemy of the NAFTA, GATT, and normalization of relations with China. Buchanan, says Hoffa, is good on globalization (meaning he's against it) but not so great on other labor issues (health and safety laws, for example...
...does carry one piece of baggage: His ardent and very effective muscling of the China trade bill through the House last month. Gore did some serious tiptoeing to deflect most of the unions' ire onto Clinton, who could afford it; now Gore's got the China bill's - and NAFTA's - main champion as his right-hand...
...with a relatively comfortable 237-197 passage of the bill granting permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) with China. Businessmen and economists rejoiced, Big Labor gnashed its teeth and tore its hair. Bill Clinton (with an assist from the Republicans, the ex-presidents and the economic good times) pulled a NAFTA encore and convinced America that free trade is still a good thing, and maybe convinced historians there'll be something good to write about him when he's gone. And it may well be the beginning of Democrats' realization that a majority of them are on the wrong side...
...Congress. "Unlike with NAFTA, it's a Republican Congress this time, and free trade is a natural GOP issue," says TIME Washington correspondent Jay Branegan. "They've made a major concession to Clinton by agreeing to vote on this as soon as May 22, mainly because most of them want to claim this victory too." But the fact that it's China this time loses a lot of right-wing Republicans over human rights and nuclear spying. So Branegan says the vote may hinge on how many Democrats Clinton can hang on to, which means somehow convincing the labor crowd...