Todd Tucker

Will Democrats Help Bush Expand NAFTA to Peru?

In a year when Bush has vetoed or promised vetoes of Democrats’ efforts to expand kids’ health care and end the war, a few Democrats have decided to do the unthinkable: support Bush’s NAFTA expansion to Peru – something opposed by the party’s base and most of its caucus in Congress, and which could come up for a vote this week or next.

After a wave of manufacturing job loss in the 1980s, President Bill Clinton inaugurated Democrats’ return to Washington by passing NAFTA in 1993 “over the dead bodies” of the party’s working class base. While most economists weren’t willing to say it on the record at the time, the profession had known for over 50 years that a policy move like NAFTA would hurt the 70 percent of Americans without a college degree, thereby increasing inequality.

The political fallout for Democrats was immediate: a year later, voters with less than a college degree – as mentioned, most Americans – dropped their support for Democrats by about 10 percent, a defection that cost the party its control of Congress and that was rooted in the party’s loss of credibility on trade and economic issues.

It took the party 12 years to regain enough lost trust that voters were willing to return them control of Congress, after more than 90 percent of the party opposed NAFTA expansion to Central America in 2005, and took back Congress in 2006 by campaigning on a fair trade, no-more-NAFTAs platform. (As I’ve written elsewhere, some of the party leadership and campaigns decided not to emphasize fair trade positions, costing them several key races. But those candidates - almost all the winning ones, in fact - that bucked the party’s leadership and ran paid ads and gave stump speeches on fair trade did much better than those that didn’t.)

Just after Congress got in session, the fair trade freshmen sent a letter to Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which handles trade issues. It read: “It is very important that we not only reverse the troubling results of the Administration’s trade agreements and trade policies, but also that we are able to deliver on the promise we made to our constituents to move our nation in a new and improved direction on trade.”

But just months later and only days after Bush blocked Democrats’ Iraq War withdrawal bill, a few key Democrats teamed up with the Bush administration on May 10 to cut a deal on NAFTA expansion. Karl Rove’s smile may be lighting up a dark corner of Texas, but vulnerable freshmen Democrats – along with many others – are panicked.

Tomorrow, we’ll get into more detail on what is being called the Deathstar Deal.

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Posted at 3:45 PM, Oct 01, 2007 in Economy
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