Feisty!

Marc Ambinder speculates that John Edwards may be getting ready to go for the jugular at tonight's debate based on campaign manager David Bonior's remarks on TV yesterday. Here's what Bonior said:

With all due respect … the Clintons did not deliver on health care," Mr. Bonior said. "They had a very important choice to make back in '93: whether to do the North American Free Trade agreement or health care. They implemented the North American Free Trade Agreement that put literally millions of workers out of work in this country and destroyed, basically, our good trading relationships we had around the world. And then in the interim, they lost any capital they had to get health care passed. … The fact of the matter is it's been an absolute disaster on health care.

I'll wait and see if that happens. Let me observe, though, that throwing the long ball on trade is a time-honored method of running a populist insurgency in the Democratic primary and John Edwards actually tried it as recently as his 2004 race against John Kerry down the stretch. It hasn't yet worked. The innovating thing about the Edwards campaign thus far is that it's leveraged his personal qualities -- charisma, southern accent, boyish good looks -- into the opportunity to put forward base-pleasing platform items that are substantially more intellectually rigorous -- and substantively ambitious -- than this kind of thing.

At any rate, there were certainly some problems with NAFTA, but I don't really think you can seriously maintain that it led to a massive increase in unemployment or ruined our trading relationships around the world.

Comments

If Republicans had supported health care reform like they had NAFTA, then Clinton would have delivered on that too. There's only so much a (mostly) law abiding President can do in the face of a united opposition party in Congress that isn't afraid to be obstructionist. Anyway I don't recall David Bonior or John Edwards getting national health insurance passed when they were in Congress either.

Posted by Ron | July 23, 2007 12:16 PM

Re: If Republicans had supported health care reform like they had NAFTA, then Clinton would have delivered on that too. There's only so much a (mostly) law abiding President can do in the face of a united opposition party in Congress that isn't afraid to be obstructionist.

At least some in the GOP were ready to deal back in the 90s. Bob Dole for one. And we should recall that Clinton did get his tax increases through Congress despite united GOP opposition. I do blame Clinton for the 90s healthcare debacle. If he had fought it with the same tenacity he fought for deficit reduction abnd NAFTA he would have gotten something passed.

Posted by JonF | July 23, 2007 12:22 PM

Well, the choice was really between raising taxes and healthcare, not NAFTA and healthcare. The tax raise took a lot out of the administration's first term. They barely got that thing passed. They maybe could have passed healthcare if they'd done it before the tax bill. NAFTA was neither here nor there.

Posted by JP | July 23, 2007 12:27 PM

Of course, Edwards is making that argument too - we should prioritize social spending over deficit reduction, force the Republicans to sacrifice their goals and political capital to balance the budget instead of us, yada yada.

I wonder if that mean Edwards doesn't intend to raise taxes at all. Even if you really think balancing the budget is unimportant, if you're a progressive you've still got to advocate drastically higher taxes just for purposes of redistribution.

Posted by JP | July 23, 2007 12:33 PM

Bonior's argument is flawed, but as JP points out, there is a kernel of truth in there. First, it wasn't NAFTA over healthcare, it was deficit reduction. And that wasn't bad policy, but you might argue that healthcare was more important. I'm pretty dubious that its a good argument, but its an argument you could make. But its never going to be compelling campaign material, so I guess they'll make some shit up about NAFTA instead.

Posted by mpowell | July 23, 2007 12:43 PM

"boyish good looks"

Mickey Kaus says John Edwards looks "fruity", and that he is "dancing around like a little fairy". I wonder if he does his little, fruity, fairy dance tonight.

Posted by Flat Mountain | July 23, 2007 12:47 PM

I don't know if it will help Edwards politically, but I think it's about time that a prominent Democrat receiving some degree of media attention makes direct arguments against NAFTA and the Clinton / AETNA health care effort.

Of course, everything's so weird given that now it's mainly a battle between those who could offer at least some degree of sane and legal government versus a band of anti-Constitutional war-mongering criminal thugs, but then Reagan II (Bush Jr.) has changed things a great deal.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 1:00 PM

Edwards is starting to feel like the Mitt Romney of the dems. He's an actor more than anything.

I love his policy positions but I can't help but get annoyed at his "slickness." Nor does he get out of jail free for the Iraq War, the guy freaking Co-Sponsored the war bill.

Sorry John. Obama is my man.

Posted by Jim | July 23, 2007 1:03 PM

Mickey Kaus says John Edwards looks "fruity"

C'mon. Which GOP leader doesn't look closeted, furtive, and dangerous?

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | July 23, 2007 1:08 PM

I love his policy positions but I can't help but get annoyed at his "slickness."

The RNC thanks you for your support in furthering their mindless attacks.

Posted by Col Bat Guano | July 23, 2007 1:23 PM

Bonior's rant is pathetic. Unemployment under Clinton and now under Bush is below the supposedly "golden era" figures of the fifties and sixties. It's Democratic protectionism that hurting our relations with under countries, not NAFTA. It's depressing that so much of the Democratic Party has so little respect for either the truth or the American people.

Posted by Alan Vanneman | July 23, 2007 1:31 PM

it's odd to me that somebody who hews to a strongly "social democratic" vision on how the US should respond to globalization wouldn't see the larger point in Bonior's statement: the sequencing of "trade first, then social insurance" is backwards, and, always has been.

commenters above are right that in dollar terms, the trade-off wasn't health care v NAFTA. but, in political capital terms, it seems clear that they traded off pretty sharply.

Posted by josh bivens | July 23, 2007 1:34 PM

Why the fuck should we care what a stupid fuck like Marc Fucking Ambinder fucking thinks?

He's already admitted that he, and many of his buddies, are trying to destroy John Edwards for sport.

Posted by Matthew Saroff | July 23, 2007 1:43 PM

Bonior was also majority whip at the time, so he's gotta take part of the blame right for this grand legislative failure? I'd like to see his NAFTA comments from the time.

Posted by jerry | July 23, 2007 1:44 PM

responding to myself, Bonior was vehemently anti-NAFTA at the time. Makes sense given that he's a fellow Michigander. I'm an idiot.

Posted by jerry | July 23, 2007 1:53 PM

Yeah, hitting Hillary on trade is a bad idea, cause there's not a lot of people rightly pissed off and scared by "free" trade and globalization.

Ygelesias, how big is that caccoon you live in?

Posted by david mizner | July 23, 2007 2:14 PM

commenters above are right that in dollar terms, the trade-off wasn't health care v NAFTA. but, in political capital terms, it seems clear that they traded off pretty sharply.

No, I was talking about political capital. NAFTA was not an unpopular bill with the median voter. Most people didn't understand the issue. Its opponents were unions, Buchananite wingers, and Ross Perot. Neither of the first two groups were responsible for sinking health care, and with Perot, who the hell knows.

Posted by JP | July 23, 2007 2:19 PM

I must say, people are parsing to death a soundbite. Obviously, Edwards has concluded correctly that health care and trade are two weakness for Hillary, and Bonior's trick was to tie the two together.

Posted by david mizner | July 23, 2007 2:23 PM

NAFTA has absolutely led to massive increases in unemployment -- but, in the States, there have been other jobs to take up the slack. There has been a massive shift to the service industry away from industrial jobs here. But look at the effects NAFTA has had on Mexico -- terrible job loss, the collapse of small farms (which, coupled with the decline of urban jobs, has created real hardship), and, even for the employed, a staggering decline in real wages. We can say, "but what concern is it of ours" -- especially in a primary debate -- but it is further evidence that NAFTA was ill-conceived and dishonestly sold.

Posted by Brian | July 23, 2007 2:45 PM

Alan Vanneman: "Unemployment under Clinton and now under Bush is below the supposedly "golden era" figures of the fifties and sixties."

The problem is that the economic figures being churned out today are almost certainly fraudulent. They simply are not consistent with each other or with the reality observed by most Americans.

We are told that inflation is low, yet a host of vital commodities - housing, health care, fuel costs, college tuition - are "rising faster than inflation." One or two anomalies would be understandable, but if all these things are rising faster than inflation, it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that the way we're measuring inflation is simply wrong and fails to take into account how people actually spend money.

We are told that unemployment is historically low. But if that were so, why have median wages stagnated for so long? Shouldn't employers be bidding up wages for scarce workers? That isn't happening. It's much more likely that the figures are cooked to artificially exclude "discouraged workers" that the government would rather forget about.

Posted by Josh G. | July 23, 2007 2:47 PM

it wasn't NAFTA over healthcare, it was deficit reduction. And that wasn't bad policy, but you might argue that healthcare was more important. I'm pretty dubious that its a good argument, but its an argument you could make.

Was that really good policy? Yes and no. Obviously it was sound economic policiy in the short/medium term. But not so sound in the longer/medium term because some jackass Republican administration was sure to come along and run up the deficits again, and of course that's what happened.

Remember Bill Clinton's rhetoric about healthcare at the tiime? I could go pull quotes, but I'm quite sure he presented healthcare reform all along as the One Big Thing Which Must Be Done At This Moment In Time. I think he has even said that it was why he ran for president. Clinton was right that fixing healthcare was the number one, great domestic issue of his time, as it is of ours. It's a 'keystone' problem for so many other problems. He sold it that way at the time, and...somebody blew it. Who was that again?

OK, you can't blame it all on HRC. But some of this mud sticks. The Clintons could get only so much done because they had constantly to play defense. We need someone tempermentally prepared to play offence. The attack may not make perfect literal sense, but it has a deeper truth. A choice, not an echo!

Posted by jonnybutter | July 23, 2007 2:56 PM

JP

while nobody on the left (unions or other) helped sink healthcare, the case has definitely been made that the resulting bitterness of the NAFTA debate kept the natural left constituents of health care from mobilizing as enthusiastically as they could have.

i more than half-buy it: the idea that it was costless for a Dem president to work hard to pass a bill with majority GOP and minority Dem support when there was another bill on the horizon needing all-but-100% party loyalty to pass seems a stretch to me.

buried for subsribers only, but, this is one of the better exemplars of the "what if health care first..." articles.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200102/beatty

Posted by josh bivens | July 23, 2007 3:25 PM

That isn't completely implausible, but there seem to be a few too many banks on that bank-shot for it to be the main cause.

Posted by JP | July 23, 2007 3:37 PM

Brian, do you have cites for any of that? I'm asking genuinely. I'm no expert on the Mexican economy, but Wikipedia (yeah, I know) says it grew 5.1% between 1995-2000, then stagnated for three years, then went back up to about 4% over the last three years. That doesn't seem all that bad. Also it says rural poverty declined from 42% to 27.9% in 2000-04. Meanwhile, this five-year-old PDF article I found on Google (I know nothing about the source but it seems to be UN-affiliated) seems to conclude that income inequality has been a mixed bag since the mid-90s. Trade liberalization has increased it in certain sectors, but inequality has declined overall. This graphic also suggests that income inequality fluctuated but on balance went down between the mid-90s and 2002 or so.

Posted by JP | July 23, 2007 4:02 PM

"At any rate, there were certainly some problems with NAFTA, but I don't really think you can seriously maintain that it led to a massive increase in unemployment or ruined our trading relationships around the world."

He doesn't have to seriously maintain that ridiculous concept--he's running for President as a populist.

Posted by Sebastian Holsclaw | July 23, 2007 5:51 PM

Re: It's Democratic protectionism that hurting our relations with under countries, not NAFTA.

An interesting claim since we have a GOP president in power, and until very recently a GOP Congress. The new Dem Congress has not passed any new trade bills that I know of, and if they did pass protectionist legislation it would have to be signed into law by you-know-who.

Re: NAFTA has absolutely led to massive increases in unemployment

Odd that back in the 90s when NAFTA was implemented my blue-collar friends and relatives (in Michigan no less!) were complaining about too much overtime, not layoffs. And if you look at, say, the auto industry the problem has not been shifting jobs to Mexico, the problem has been the industry is in free-fall and is cutting jobs, period. To the extent that manufacturing jobs have been lost not to automation (the big job killer) but to foreign countries, China not Mexico is the culprit-- and China is not part of the NAFTA deal.

Re: It's much more likely that the figures are cooked to artificially exclude "discouraged workers" that the government would rather forget about.

That "cooking" has always been true. Unemployment figures have never included discouraged workers.

Posted by JonF | July 24, 2007 5:14 PM