    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book II)]
    [November 1, 1997]
    [Pages 1475-1477]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks in the Globalization and Trade Session of the Democratic
    National Committee's Autumn Retreat on Amelia Island
    November 1, 1997

    [The discussion is joined in progress.]

    Role of National Economic Council

        Q. Perhaps the time has come to elevate the National Economic
    Council to the level of stature that the National Security Council has
    had. Yesterday I attended in Washington a Council on Foreign Relations
    meeting which was a retrospective of the first 50 years of the National
    Security Council, at which a half-dozen former and the current National
    Security Adviser were present. And the scope of their remarks and their
    ability to integrate across the disparate organizational interests of
    Defense, State, other U.S. Government and nongovernmental organizations
    to create policy synthesis was, although not perfect, very impressive.
    And I was wondering whether you had a comment on whether the United
    States Government perhaps needed at this time a comparable structure.

    [At this point, the moderator invited the President to respond.]

        The President. First of all, while it doesn't have a 50-year
    history, I think the record will reflect that's exactly what we've done.
    I brought Bob Rubin in to be the head of a new National Economic Council
    to reconcile all the different economic agencies. And then Laura Tyson
    did it. Now Gene Sperling and Dan Tarullo do it. As a result of it, for
    the first time in most business people's experience, you have the State
    Department aggressively working in Embassies around the world to help
    American business; you have the Export-Import Bank, Overseas Private
    Investment Council working with the Agriculture Department, the Commerce
    Department, and all the other economic agencies, especially, obviously,
    the Treasury Department.
        And it works like the NSC does. We try to get everybody together,
    reach a common policy, and then all back it. Sometimes we don't quite
    get there, but we've had a remarkable amount of success, and I think
    that it is the single most significant organizational innovation that
    our administration has made in the White House. And I think that the
    economic record of the administration is due at least in part to the
    institution of the National Economic Council.

    [The discussion continued.]

    Integration of Diplomatic and Economic Policy

        Q. ----I think the question is whether, organizationally the
    Government needs to think about different ways to both create that and
    sustain a free trade area of the Americas.
        The President. Well, basically, I agree with you. The reason that I
    asked Mack McLarty to take on that job is that I thought our
    relationship with Latin America was of profound importance and that it
    cut across economic and political lines, and we needed to have somebody
    concentrating on it who could deal with not just specific diplomatic or
    security issues but the whole range of political and economic issues.
    And it's worked.

    [[Page 1476]]

        And what I'm hoping we can do now is take a look at whether we could
    do the same sort of thing in other parts of the world and how we'd have
    to reorganize the State Department and how we might integrate our
    diplomatic and economic efforts even more closely than we have to date.
        Let me just say generically, one of the things that stunned me when
    I became President was how antiquated all the organizational and
    information structures of the Federal Government were. When I walked in
    the Oval Office as President the first day, Jimmy Carter's phone system
    was on the desk--you know, where you punch those big old plastic buttons
    and the light comes up--[laughter]--and you dialed. And if you were
    having a call with three people, everybody else in the White House that
    had the line on the button could pick it up and listen. It was
    unbelievable--1993--we had an almost 20-year-old phone system.
        And believe me, that is a metaphor for other problems. One of the
    things that Speaker Gingrich and I have discussed as a possible
    bipartisan project is an effort to totally upgrade the information
    systems and communications systems of both the executive and the
    legislative branches, to try to get us in tune with the world. I know we
    had some high-tech executives testifying before Congress recently, and
    they were asked--they said, ``One real problem is in communications. We
    operate at 3 times the speed of normal business decisions.'' Normal
    business operates at 3 times the speed of Government; therefore, we're
    at a 9-to-1 disadvantage in trying to harmonize these policies.
    [Laughter]
        So I think Bob's made some very good points about that.

    [The discussion continued.]

    Trade Policy and Domestic Economic Development

        The President. 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

    [[Page 1477]]

    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.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:20 a.m. in Salon One at the Ritz-Carlton
    Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Mark Nichols, chief executive
    officer, Cabazon Band of Mission Indians.