Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, September 5, 1993                   TAG: 9309170429
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: F3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: PAT TRULY
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ISOLATIONISM

Look at how the lines are being drawn on the North American Free Trade Agreement. Formulated by a Republican administration, pushed by a Democratic administration and holding real promise of benefit sprinkled throughout the economy over the next 20 years, NAFTA is nothing if not mainstream.

Or look at who is against NAFTA. I mean really outspokenly against it: Pat Buchanan. Ross Perot. Jesse Jackson. Leaders of the AFL-CIO. Ralph Nader. The Washington Times. The Liberty Lobby.

In other words, the disaffected. The right and left fringes of American political society, plus a labor movement willing to use fear as a reason for inaction.

What they have in common is a knack for the catchy phrase: "sucking sound'' (Perot); ``an attack on U.S. sovereignty'' (Buchanan); ``a leveraged buyout of American liberty'' (also Buchanan); the inevitable rhyming ``NAFTA is a shafta'' from Jackson.

You get a mental image of these folks waiting for the audience to hold up signs awarding them an 8 or a 10 for snazzy sloganism.

These are strange bedfellows. If the radical left and the radical right are both against something, it is bound to have merit. It's sort of like the Middle Eastern peace proposals. Hard-line Israelis and the most radical Shiite Palestinians are afraid it might actually achieve peace. Some of these NAFTA opponents, I am convinced, are afraid it might work rather than convinced it won't.

Meanwhile, to those who lived through, or have read about, the years approaching American participation in World War II, some of this stuff should sound familiar. In some ways it's 1940 all over again. We are back to ``America First'' (which was an anti-draft, anti-defense-buildup movement that had Anglophobic, Nazi-sympathizer, anti-Semitic and defeatist overtones). We are back to isolationism. We are back to all the stuff that four years of international war and 40-odd years of leadership in a shrinking world should have exorcised from the American psyche.

Buchanan and Perot lead this group. It is surely an accident, and hardly worth mentioning at all, that both of them (like Jackson) have political aspirations based on an appeal to Americans who are alienated from the mainstream. Nor should it be a surprise that such Americans do not ask that their leaders know what they are talking about, merely that they speak loudly.

Jackson is against NAFTA, I presume, because it doesn't guarantee every poor American a job. Like Perot and the AFL-CIO, he says it will send jobs to Mexico. Buchanan, the anti-immigrant candidate, conveniently ignores the likelihood that a better economy in Mexico would keep at home millions of Mexicans who now enter this country (at some risk to themselves and expense to the rest of us) in search of work. Labor clings to a job climate that already is a thing of the past. The 1960s are not coming back. That is, indeed, the reason American working folks need NAFTA. The jobs of the future need not be burger-flipping jobs if we plan now to make the things others can't make and to create markets for the things we produce.

I have heard two excellent answers to the constantly repeated stuff about Mexico ``sucking'' away all our jobs. The sound-bite version is that if low wages were all that mattered to business, Haiti and Bangladesh would have all the world's jobs. The other was a statement some time ago by Chrysler Chairman Robert Eaton. Eaton said his company already can build all the cars it wants to build in Mexico and sell them in the United States. What it can't do, because of Mexican restrictions that NAFTA would remove, is export U.S-made cars for sale in Mexico.

Anyway, NAFTA is becoming another test of whether Americans are really serious about the future or merely scared. If those who look longingly backward to the 19th century (Buchanan), or who just have their own egos to stroke (Perot), or who believe in the tooth fairy (Jackson, Nader) represent a majority in this country, we're already in worse trouble than any free-trade treaty possibly could cause.

\ Pat Truly is a Fort Worth, Tex., Star-Telegram columnist and editorial writer.

N.Y. Times News Service