Word: pacts
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...North American Free Trade Agreement, Bill Clinton was already lining up allies for future battles. As Air Force One carried him to Seattle for a meeting with 13 Asian and Pacific leaders, he called Lane Kirkland of the AFL-CIO to say their bitter differences on the trade pact should not prevent them from joining forces on health-care reform and worker- retraining plans. He called Dan Rostenkowski and urged the House Ways and Means Committee chairman to push the languishing jobless-benefits bill. From the White House, Hillary Clinton joined in, telephoning Tom Donahue, Kirkland's secretary-treasurer...
...Labor Day. That gave the opposition time to lock up votes among House Democrats, who tend to be protectionist and mildly isolationist anyway. It also gave Clinton's own advisers, who were split over the wisdom of NAFTA, room to caper: several urged Clinton to pull out of the pact while he still had a chance and began planting the idea with party officials. The result was confusion...
...unions and Ross Perot's movement -- see, not entirely wrongly, the U.S. economy being hurt by growing foreign competition, and view NAFTA, less logically, as the latest in a succession of what Perot calls "dumb trade agreements" that have taken a grievous toll of American jobs. Proponents regard the pact as an unavoidable necessity if the U.S. is going to compete with the trade blocs forming in Europe and Asia. Rejection, they argue, would be a futile and dangerous attempt to wall off the U.S. from a global economy that no longer shows much respect for national borders...
Should Washington ever try to push APEC toward becoming an Asian NAFTA, the task will not be easy. Less developed Pacific nations are averse to any trade pact that might compel them to lower tariffs protecting fledgling industries. If Clinton shows up in Seattle without a win on NAFTA, Asian nations will also be under less pressure to deal; one reason for them even to consider a Pacific Rim trade group is to ensure themselves a defensive base in the event that GATT should fail or NAFTA take a protectionist turn. Thus the White House has been playing down this...
...risky move may have paid off for the Clinton Administration as a contentious, sometimes personal debate between Vice President Al Gore and NAFTA opponent Ross Perot seemed to raise support for the pact. Polls showed that opinions of NAFTA became more favorable after the debate, televised on CNN's Larry King Live. At week's end, however, the White House was still at , least 20 votes short of the number needed to pass NAFTA when it comes before the House this week...