The Executive's Local Constituencies

The peculiarity of the American electoral process known as the Electoral College serves to tie the president to specific states. Rather than forcing the president to represent a national constituency, the Electoral College encourages campaigning to win slim majorities in key states in order to achieve big payoffs. Because the system is set up to reward the winner of a state with all of that state's electoral votes, small victory margins lead to large swings in electoral vote totals. This encourages executives to seek re-election in the same fashion that Bush did: appeasing regional interests at the cost of national welfare. The Electoral College proves the old adage that all politics are local. It cuts severely against the logic of turning trade powers over to the executive because it encourages the type of behavior described above, severely dampening the executive's abilities to stop the pernicious effects of logrolling and special interest politics.

Unfortunately, using the power of the executive to pander to local interests is not isolated to recent actions by the Bush administration. Besides using the power of the executive to ensure re-election, presidents have also been known to help political allies using trade policies to attempt to influence legislative votes. One particularly salient example of this sort of power-brokering came in the mid 1980's when President Reagan attempted to raise tariffs on the textile industry in order to garner the favor of key politicians up for re-election in 1984. Specifically, two of the Republican Party's most influential senators, Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, as well as Representative Carroll Campbell Jr., had strong ties to the textile industry. This was an important time frame for textiles as well because the United States was negotiating a new Multi-Fiber Arrangement (MFA), the agreement that governs the terms of world textile trade. For years, the textile industry had struggled under foreign competition and saw the new MFA as an opportunity to curtail imports. Unfortunately, Reagan was not cooperating; instead choosing to negotiate an MFA that was very favorable for developing nations. "As recently as the October [1981] North-South summit in Cancun, Mexico, the Reaganites were holding up their more accommodative position on textile imports as an example of U.S. willingness to open markets to less developed nations."(13)

However, during the MFA negotiations the president was attempting to pass a foreign aid bill that was particularly crucial to his political agenda at the time.(14) These legislators, seeing their opportunity to score a big political victory, threatened to kill the president's foreign aid package if he didn't help the domestic textile industry by negotiating an MFA that was very favorable to American interests. One observer described this process as:

Representative Carroll Campbell Jr. (R-S. C.) and Senator Strom Thurmond (R-S. C.), saw an opportunity to push the Administration toward a more restrictive policy by threatening to torpedo the foreign aid bill. Campbell and Thurmond pressed their case in successive meetings with President Reagan and White House Chief of Staff James A. Baker. Soon afterward, the President ordered negotiators in Geneva to "strengthen" the U.S. proposal. Greased by key Republican votes, the foreign aid bill then passed by a 222-184 margin, becoming the first foreign assistance measure to clear the House in two years. (15)

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