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I didn't want to hijack a similar thread to which this is ultimately tangential, so I wanted to give the flames and popcorns for this its own thread:
Perot is the reason Senator Clinton was First Lady
And I think those of us who deny that are, well, in denial.
Here's the sick irony of it all and part of why a lot of the "angry white man" right-wing was so angry at Clinton. Perot ran on essentially an anti-NAFTA platform, millions of people voted for it who would probably otherwise have voted for Bush, and ended up giving the election to Clinton, who worked even harder to make NAFTA happen than Bush Sr would have.
Labor, at that point, wiped the **** from its face and began a decade-long exile it's only beginning now to stir from. Keep in mind we have three forces here: old business, new business, and labor. New business loves NAFTA, labor hates it, and old business is at best ambivalent. Clinton and the rest of the DLC have been betting our party's future for a few decades now on the premise that new business is going to eventually outweigh labor. Bush Sr. represented old business, Clinton new business. Bush Jr. -- and this may surprise you -- represents new business too. His economic policies are not terribly different from Clinton's (both sides overstate the importance of Bush's tax cuts, though I'd certainly like that money back in the treasury): both did whatever they can to encourage debt-based consumerism and other forms of cheap, mobile capital while taking it as given that the US's industrial base will continue to decline. To put it glibly, the fact that you can get a $2 shirt at Wal-Mart makes up for the fact that the local textile mill closed and you lost your job -- just put that shirt on your credit card and work as a barista.
The bourgeois part of the Left, overjoyed at having "one of our own" in the White House, raked it in from the NAFTA windfall while driving the increasingly-pressured lower and middle classes to the right (see "What's the Matter with Kansas"). Seeing no help from their traditional protectors, middle- and working-class people flocked to Gingrich in 1994 because if the government was going to collude with business, at least they could try to make government weaker.
NAFTA was just one trade accord, but it represents an entire attitude towards economics that is collapsing around us: cheap, highly mobile capital and labor. When money can move easily, it has a tendency to accumulate, and it has. Senator Clinton still, rightly or wrongly, is fixed in many people's minds (including mine) as an advocate for this economic worldview. Unless she starts touting some serious anti-corporate-managed-trade language, she's going to have trouble convincing me (and, I think, other people like me) that she has had a change of heart about this.
On a side note, the question "Was Perot right?" is only a "gotcha" because we've fallen for this idiotic idea that a politician must have the same position on even peripherally related issues over the course of decades. Maybe NAFTA was the best best for 1992 but I think it's pretty clear that nobody is really satisfied with it except for people whose chief worry is keeping their diamond-tipped cane from scratching their monocle.
Would Hillary Clinton sell labor down the river the same way Bill Clinton did for 8 years? Is she committed to workers' rights here and abroad, or is she in favor of expanding corporate-managed trade agreements?
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