[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.