n November 1992. Ostensibly pro-business, it was the George Bush presidency that concluded the tri-country negotiations that resulted in the North American Free Trade Agreement. As its guiding principle, President Bush's negotiating team maintained the classic conservative stance that any reduction of government involvement in commerce - particularly the reduction and/or elimination of trade barriers - is to the ultimate good of the business community and, by extension, the economy of the nation as a whole. Based on this foundation of belief, Mr. Bush's team was able to bypass a traditional isolationist tendency inherent in the American political psyche; in this they were encouraged by President Bush, who was well known to be more interested in the international scene than in domestic concerns.
The battle lines would appear to have been fairly clearly drawn in the presidential elections of 1992 - a Republican president obsessed with foreign affairs to the detriment of the homefront situation, versus a Democratic Party candidate stressing domestic concerns - save for the fact that candidate Bill Clinton promoted himself as a self-proclaimed "New Democrat." In theoretical terms, the "New Democrat" movement grew out of a coterie of youngish Democratic politicians, led by then-Arkansas Governor Clinton in the 1980s, who sought to move their party to a firm middle-of-the-road position that would allow it to recapture huge blocks of the middle class vote that had been lost to their opposing party during the "Reagan Revolution" years. In practical terms, to be a New Democrat involved marrying traditional Democratic Party social welfare concerns with moderate Republican Party pro-business programs - including free trade in general principle. In the summer of 1992, when New Democrat Bill Clinton was nominated his party's candidate for the upcoming presidential election, he had already defeated during the primaries anti-free trade Senat...