Nineteen months after NAFTA was instituted, a report by the watchdog group Public Citizen found that 90 percent of the promises made by its proponents had not come true. Companies that had pledged to create jobs if NAFTA passed—including General Electric, Mattel, Procter & Gamble, Scott Paper, and Zenith—had actually cut US jobs. The Department of Labor reported that thirty-eight thousand workers had lost their jobs because of NAFTA in just its first year and a half, and almost seventy thousand US workers had filed claims with the Labor Department to receive unemployment aid specifically related to NAFTA.31
The agreement would not redeem itself over time, either. By 2010 the trade deficit with Mexico had soared to $97 billion. US exports to Mexico had risen as expected, but imports from Mexico, which displaced US jobs, had risen even more. According to a report by the Economic Policy Institute, the ten hardest-hit states included Emanuel’s native Illinois along with other already-struggling Rust Belt states like Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan.32
The Handshake
Emanuel played a role in choreographing one of the iconic images of the twentieth century. That would be the famous handshake between Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin at the signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993.33 The accords called for Israeli troop withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank and affirmed a Palestinian right to self-determination. CNN remarked upon the “uneasy, yet unforgettable handshake.”34 Emanuel, Clinton, and staffer John Podesta staged and meticulously rehearsed the handshake ahead of time. Emanuel studied footage of the 1978 Camp David Accords handshake where President Jimmy Carter oversaw an agreement between Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin.35 Emanuel put a new stamp on the moment by having Clinton spread his arms around the two Middle East leaders, bringing them together.36
Arafat and Rabin’s clasp was a major international event signifying what many hoped would be a shift in Middle Eastern affairs. Meanwhile, for Emanuel, it was a relatively minor but interesting example of his ability to shift positions and allegiances as the political situation dictated, always with a keen eye to managing the image.
Photo by Kari Lydersen.
Mexicans protest the killings of women in the border city Jua´rez, widely seen as an outcome of the sweeping economic changes wrought by NAFTA—one of Emanuel’s Clinton-era projects.
Crime and Immigration Bills
Along with his work on NAFTA, Emanuel would frequently invoke with pride his role in the Clinton administration’s law enforcement and crime-fighting efforts for decades to come. He helped Clinton pass bills cracking down on sex offenders, assault weapon ownership, street crime, and “terrorism”; and he staged photo opportunities with the president surrounded by police officers in uniform. Emanuel played a key role in Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which was signed into law in August 1994.37 The act put one hundred thousand more officers on the street and allocated $9.7 billion in funding for prisons and $6.1 billion in funding for prevention programs. The bill also banned the manufacture of nineteen types of assault weapons, increased the reach of the death penalty, and created harsher penalties for immigration-related and gang-related offenses.38
Author Noam Scheiber described Emanuel as a driving force behind the crime bill: “Middle America thought Clinton was soft. And so Emanuel, from his perch as second-string White House counselor without portfolio, excluded from the action on health care, concocted an anti-crime campaign almost out of thin air.”39
Clinton, Emanuel, and Democratic supporters often stressed aspects of the bill that were supported by many Americans across the political spectrum: gun control, domestic violence prevention, and officers on the ground. The assault weapons ban naturally infuriated the National Rifle Association and many powerful Republicans but was lauded by gun control and public safety advocates. The bill also increased penalties on repeat sex offenders, mandated financial restitution for rape and other sex crimes, increased funding for women’s shelters and domestic violence prevention programs, and mandated that restraining orders be honored across state lines.40
These were logical, humane, and important reforms that aided the vulnerable and abused. But other aspects of the legislation were widely seen as draconian tough-on-crime measures that would have disproportionate impacts on people of color and low-income people. The Justice Policy Institute cited the bill in calling Clinton “the incarceration president” because spending on incarceration and the number of inmates behind bars—disproportionately African Americans—skyrocketed on his watch. The institute noted that the incarceration rate at the end of the Clinton administration was 476 per 100,000 citizens, compared to 332 per 100,000 at the end of President George H. W. Bush’s term and 247 per 100,000 at the end of the Reagan administration.41
The 1994 act, the country’s largest crime bill ever, expanded the scope of the death penalty to make more than sixty offenses punishable by execution.42 In the Chicago Sun-Times, pundit Carl T. Rowan wrote, “Can Clinton be blind to the obvious truth that the death penalty is imposed mostly upon the poor, the black, brown and other minorities of America? Any law that adds to the unfairness of our judicial system will provoke more crime. And doesn’t the president know that there is no credible evidence that electrocuting, gassing, shooting or hanging felons is a deterrent to criminal behavior?”43
The law aimed to crack down on gangs, including allowing up to ten years of additional prison time if a crime involved gang issues.44 And it increased reliance on “boot camps” for juvenile offenders.45 While arguably preferable to other types of incarceration, such boot camps would become the subject of many horror stories, including reports of abuse and youth suffering serious injuries and death after being forced to do hard physical exercise in extreme conditions.46
The crime bill also eliminated Pell grant funding for inmates pursuing higher education in federal and state prisons. Since the 1965 Higher Education Act, Pell grants had provided a way for many incarcerated men and women—often from poor communities with little education—to make productive use of their time behind bars. Building more prisons while eliminating an important resource for those inside them was cruel and smashed the already-weak argument that US prisons were rehabilitative as much as punitive, prison reformers said.47
The crime bill also instituted a federal “three strikes” provision of the type later passed by various states. As a result, a third conviction for serious violent felonies or drug trafficking offenses would mean life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Analysts said the provision was more posturing than substance, since relatively few violent crimes are federal offenses.48 But perhaps the posturing worked. In early 1994, even before the final version of the crime bill was signed, a Washington Post/ABC poll found that 39 percent of Americans thought Democrats were doing a better job on crime than Republicans, compared to 32 percent with the inverse view.49
“The impact on the political climate I think was significant,” Marc Mauer, executive director of the nonprofit justice reform group the Sentencing Project, told longtime Chicago journalist Curtis Black. “Here you have a Democratic administration saying we can be as tough as anybody on crime. You have a Democratic president supporting ‘three strikes you’re out.’”50
In 1995 Clinton outraged criminal justice reformers and civil rights leaders when he upheld the sentencing disparity between offenses involving crack and powder cocaine, wherein crimes involving one gram of crack received prison terms roughly equal to crimes involving one