1994 REDUX: The consequences of Dems' new NAFTA

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http://www.workingassetsblog.com/2007/09/1994_redux_the_consequences_of.html

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My latest weekly newspaper column for Creators Syndicate is out today, and, as promised, it is on the three-headed NAFTA quietly wending its way through Congress right now. Let me add some political data to the substantive details in the column about how this new NAFTA sells out American workers and how it parallels the destructive push for the original NAFTA in the early 1990s.

As various polls show, Democrats are losing ground because its own voters are becoming disillusioned. An August Gallup poll, for example, reports that "Congress' approval rating the lowest it has been since Gallup first tracked public opinion of Congress with this measure in 1974." This mirrors a June Washington Post poll finding a major drop in approval ratings for the Congress - and that "much of that drop was fueled by lower approval ratings of the Democrats in Congress among strong opponents of the war, independents and liberal Democrats." OpenLeft's Chris Bowers yesterday noted that Republicans actually give the Democratic Congress higher job-approval ratings than Democrats and Independents - and that's not encouraging, considering that most self-declared Republicans will likely end up voting Republican for Congress come election time.

What these numbers say is that Democratic and Independent voters understand that they are being ignored by Congress - that Democratic leaders are driving "over their dead bodies," as I quote the chairman of American Express saying in my column. While the war is the most high profile of the issues, the fight over jobs, wages, the economy and political corruption underlies everything - and is all encapsulated by the trade debate, as it was during NAFTA. And any look at polling trends show that Americans understand that NAFTA sold them out, and want a change. This is why, as I noted in the column, so many Democratic candidates ran explicitly on a promise to end NAFTA-style trade agreements.

That's why Democratic leaders' push for this new NAFTA is not just a shameless reversal of a campaign promise or a wholesale abandonment of the middle class, it is also politically dangerous because it threatens to further depress support for Democrats from Democratic and Independent voters. Remember, folks, the 1994 Republican takeover did not happen because of a massive upsurge in Republican voting - it happened because Democratic turnout was depressed.
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