The Audacity of Hope

CAFTA debate, when I and a group of other senators were invited to the White House
for discussions. I told the President that I believed in the benefits of trade, and that I had
no doubt the White House could squeeze out the votes for this particular agreement. But
I said that resistance to CAFTA had less to do with the specifics of the agreement and
more to do with the growing insecurities of the American worker. Unless we found
strategies to allay those fears, and sent a strong signal to American workers that the
federal government was on their side, protectionist sentiment would only grow.
The President listened politely and said that he’d be interested in hearing my ideas. In
the meantime, he said, he hoped he could count on my vote.
He couldn’t. I ended up voting against CAFTA, which passed the Senate by a vote of 55
to 45. My vote gave me no satisfaction, but I felt it was the only way to register a
protest against what I considered to be the White House’s inattention to the losers from
free trade. Like Bob Rubin, I am optimistic about the long-term prospects for the U.S.
economy and the ability of U.S. workers to compete in a free trade environment—but
only if we distribute the costs and benefits of globalization more fairly across the
population.
THE LAST TIME we faced an economic transformation as disruptive as the one we
face today, FDR led the nation to a new social compact—a bargain between
government, business, and workers that resulted in widespread prosperity and economic
security for more than fifty years. For the average American worker, that security rested
on three pillars: the ability to find a job that paid enough to support a family and save
for emergencies; a package of health and retirement benefits from his employer; and a
government safety net—Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, unemployment
insurance, and to a lesser extent federal bankruptcy and pension protections—that could
cushion the fall of those who suffered setbacks in their lives.
Certainly the impulse behind this New Deal compact involved a sense of social
solidarity: the idea that employers should do right by their workers, and that if fate or
miscalculation caused any one of us to stumble, the larger American community would
be there to lift us up.
But this compact also rested on an understanding that a system of sharing risks and
rewards can actually improve the workings of the market. FDR understood that decent
wages and benefits for workers could create the middle-class base of consumers that
would stabilize the U.S. economy and drive its expansion. And FDR recognized that we
would all be more likely to take risks in our lives—to change jobs or start new
businesses or welcome competition from other countries—if we knew that we would
have some measure of protection should we fail.
That’s what Social Security, the centerpiece of New Deal legislation, has provided—a
form of social insurance that protects us from risk. We buy private insurance for
ourselves in the marketplace all the time, because as self-reliant as we may be, we
recognize that things don’t always work out as planned—a child gets sick, the company
we work for shuts its doors, a parent contracts Alzheimer’s, the stock market portfolio
turns south. The bigger the pool of insured, the more risk is spread, the more coverage