He wears pinstripe suits with suspenders and is addressed as "Mr. Ambassador." But Mickey Kantor is no diplomat. Take, for example, the way he described French negotiators who have fought to retain barriers to American farm exports: they have "held their breath and stomped their little feet," he said in an interview last week. Publicly, he has threatened retaliation against half a dozen "unfair" trade practices by the Europeans, the Japanese and others. And in response to foreign officials who sputter about his "bullying" tactics, he says with a tight smile and easy Tennessee drawl, "I think our message is getting through."
A political wheeler-dealer who was Bill Clinton's surprise choice to be U.S. Trade Representative, Kantor had little experience in the acronymic arcana of GATT and NAFTA and other trade agreements. Yet he has proved a remarkably quick study, in the manner of a crack litigator mastering a complex brief. He is, by training and nature, an aggressive lawyer and lobbyist. Kantor sees himself not as a peacemaker but as a warrior who, as he puts it, "hates to lose." (Those who beat him at tennis have learned to watch out for his flying racquet.) He has represented migrant farmworkers and lobbied on behalf of giant oil and aerospace companies. Now, he says, he has two new clients: Bill Clinton and "the American worker."
So don't expect the occasional tiffs over Chablis and microchip exports -- which occasionally punctuated the relatively laid-back approach to trade during the Bush and Reagan years -- to be settled quite so amicably in the future. President Clinton has, like many moderate Democrats, publicly straddled the trade-off between creating export jobs at home and subjecting U.S. workers to increasing competition from abroad. His speeches gently emphasize the goal of free trade one day, while sounding off against "unfair" competition the next. But behind closed doors, a tough new policy is emerging, and Kantor is primed to play its bad cop.
The stakes are rising, as an American economy that was virtually self- sufficient in the 1950s and 1960s has become increasingly dependent on exports for economic growth. Just in the years between 1986 and 1990, the number of Americans who produce goods for export jumped to 7.2 million from 5 million. Export-related jobs have grown throughout the economic slump, and they pay about $3,500 more a year than the average American job. If Kantor is successful in negotiating lower trade barriers, says Senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat influential on trade issues, he "will create more new jobs in America than any other Cabinet member."
On trade, as with music and much else, Clinton's and Kantor's differences with their predecessors are not only political but generational as well. George Bush and his closest advisers were raised in the Great Depression and seared by World War II, and they blamed both calamities in large part on what Bush called "those Smoot-Hawley days" -- a reference to the protectionist 1930 U.S. tariff that crippled the world trading system. Under Bush, says one of his former economic advisers, "the Europeans and Japanese knew that if they held out long enough, we wouldn't retaliate in any serious way, out of fear that we might trigger another escalation of trade barriers like in the '30s."