Bill Clinton: “Before I go, if I could just say one thing about this trade issue, because we need your help on this. I think we ought…”

“Before I go, if I could just say one thing about this trade issue, because we need your help on this. I think we ought to say, first of all, that the Democratic Party has moved on the trade issue. Even a lot of the people who are against fast track basically want it to pass in the sense--and they know that we need to open more markets to Latin America and that there are political as well as economic benefits to a free trade area of the Americas, to the African initiative that I have announced. They know the biggest middle class in the world is in India. They know that the Indian subcontinent, if the differences between Pakistan and India could be resolved, would be an enormous opportunity. They know these things. This is not a secret. And there is much more of a willingness to embrace this in our caucus in the Congress than I think is--than you would sense. The question is how to get over the hurdle of the feeling that it's not just foreign markets that are more closed to us but that other countries--through the use of labor practices we think are wrong, or Mark mentioned the pollution problem in Mexicali, which we are moving to address and have some money to do so--that they'll gain unfair economic advantage; and secondly, the feeling that while we all talk a good game--and I think this is really the issue--while everybody talks a good game, our country really does not have a very good system, or at least it's not adequate, for dealing with people who are dislocated in this churning modern economy. And I might say that the Council of Economic Advisers did a study for me which indicated that 80 percent of the job dislocation was the result of technological change, only 20 percent from trade patterns. But my view is, if you're my age and you've got a kid in college and you lose your job at some company, who cares what the cause is? So I think that really thoughtful people need to think about how are we going to set up a system of kind of lifetime education and training and growth, and how are we going to give people who are dislocated the transitional support they need for their families so they don't lose all self-respect and become desperate, and try to increase the flow here because we know we have--today--you've got significant shortages in America in high-wage job categories that could be filled by people who are being dislocated today from other high-wage or moderate-wage jobs. So what I would like to ask a lot of you who agree with me on this trade issue to think about is, is we have moved our party. You may not be able to tell it on the vote here in the fast track, but the truth is, if you listen to the arguments, there's almost nobody standing up saying anymore, like they used to a few years ago, ``Trade's a bad thing. We're always going to be taken advantage of. It's always going to be a terrible thing.'' You don't hear that much anymore. People are genuinely concerned now about making sure that the rules are fair and that the dislocation is addressed. So I say that to ask you, first of all, to keep on working on fast track, because our opponents are wrong and it won't create a single job if we lose; it will cost us jobs. So that's the short-term thing; we've got to fight for that. But we also have to recognize that you've got three categories of people out there: those that are displaced by trade; a much larger group of people that are just being dislocated by technological and economic changes that are going to occur anyway; and then you've got a group of people that we're trying to address with the empowerment zones who haven't been affected one way or the other by trade or economic growth because they live in islands that haven't been penetrated by free enterprise in America. And in a funny way, we should look at them as a market, the way we look at the Caribbean or Latin America or Africa or anyplace else. We should look at these people as a market. Mark Nichols represents a Native American group. If you think about the Native American tribes that aren't making a ton of money off their gambling casinos, that need jobs and investment, if you think about the inner city neighborhoods, if you think about the rural areas that haven't been touched, I think as Democrats we ought to be more creative about thinking about how we can push an aggressive trade agenda and say we need all these people, too, and it's a great growth opportunity--and not be deterred in trying to do what we ought to be doing on trade but also understand that this other thing is a legitimate issue and we have to address it. In the next few days we're going to do more in the Congress to do this, but I think--I'm talking about this is going to be an ongoing effort. It's going to take about 10 years, I think, to just keep pushing at it as we learn more and more and more about how to do it. And if the people in the country get the sense that this is a dual commitment on our part and that we're passionate about both, I think that is not only the winning position, I think, more importantly, it is the right position.”