Bill Clinton: “I think we'll have the agreement ready in the fairly near future. You know, our people are still working with the…”

“I think we'll have the agreement ready in the fairly near future. You know, our people are still working with the Mexican Government and with the Canadians on the side agreements. We're trying to work out what the environmental agreement will say, what the labor agreement will say, and then what the fairest way to deal with enforcement is. The Mexicans say, and there is some merit to their position, that they're worried about transferring their sovereignty in enforcement to a multilateral commission. Even in the United States, to be fair, we have some folks who are worried about that, about giving that up. On the other hand, if we're going to have an environmental agreement and a labor standards agreement that means something, then there has to be ultimately some consequences for violating them. So what we're trying to do is to agree on an approach which would say that if there is a pattern of violations, if you keep on violating it past a certain point--maybe not an isolated incident, but a pattern of violation--there is going to be some enforcement. There must be consequences. And we're working out the details of that. But I still feel quite good about it. And this is just an area where I disagree with Mr. Perot and with others. I think that we will win big if we have a fair agreement that integrates more closely the Mexican economy and the American economy and leads us from there to Chile to other market economies in Latin America and gives us a bigger world in which to trade. I think that's the only way a rich country can grow richer. If you look at what Japan and other countries in the Pacific are doing to reach out in their own region, it's a pretty good lesson to us that we had better worry about how to build those bridges in our own area. So this is an idea battle. You know, you've got a lot of questions, and I want to answer them all. But let me say not every one of these things can be distilled simply into politics, you know, who's for this and who's for that, and if this person is for this, somebody else has got to be for that. A lot of these things honestly involved real debates over ideas, over who's right and wrong about the world toward which we're moving. And the answers are not self-evident. And one of the reasons that I wanted to run for President is I wanted to sort of open the floodgates for debating these ideas so that we could try to change in the appropriate way. So I just have a difference of opinion. I believe that the concept of NAFTA is sound, even though, as you know, I thought that the details needed to be improved. POW/MIA's”