NAFTA Volleys Fly Coast to Coast as House Vote Nears : Trade: Vice president in Washington warns of dire consequences if pact doesn’t pass. Perot in Seattle warns of dire consequences if it does.

SEATTLE —  With the House vote only 72 hours away, the thunder and smoke rose coast to coast Sunday over the North American Free Trade Agreement.

But what effect the warnings of a looming national catastrophe or of the undermining of democracy may have had on wavering lawmakers remained unclear.

In Washington, Vice President Al Gore predicted that the Administration would pull off a narrow victory and save President Clinton from what he called a catastrophic defeat for U.S. foreign policy initiatives. A loss, he said, would be a terrible thing for Congress to do to its President and to the nation.

Across the country in Seattle, Ross Perot, the pact’s leading naysayer, seemed to concede that the momentum might be shifting Clinton’s way. But that’s because the President is “buying” lawmakers’ votes with pork-barrel promises, Perot complained.

Perhaps serious or maybe just to make his point, Perot told 1,600 people at a rally in a Seattle theater that Clinton’s wooing of congressional members might warrant criminal investigation.

Perot said that providing fence-sitting lawmakers with a taxpayer-financed dinner Sunday in the White House and striking budget bargains with them on local projects amounted to the same kind of anti-democracy sneaky dealing that Republicans are accused of in New Jersey, where a GOP campaign manager said money was spent to suppress black voter turnout.

“Washington thinks it’s illegal to go out and encourage people not to vote, (and) you’ve got criminal inquiries going, right? Well, don’t you think you ought to have a criminal inquiry going about buying votes for NAFTA?” Perot asked. His crowd roared approval.

With the reasoned and the emotional arguments having been made so many times in past weeks, it seemed possible Sunday only to state them again. That and to predict the outcome, an inevitable tactic to try to create a sense of momentum on a vote that very well may be won or lost by the slenderest of margins.

The nation’s airwaves sizzled with the subject Sunday.

Gore acknowledged on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that “undecided members of Congress still hold the balance” on the historic trade pact with Mexico and Canada. He forecast victory by “a very close vote” but said that, if he is wrong, the price to the United States would be high.

“It’s a foreign policy issue as well as an economic issue,” Gore said. “It’s good for us economically, but the consequences of a defeat for NAFTA in the foreign policy arena would be really catastrophic.”

Gore noted that on the day after the vote, Clinton will fly to Seattle for an Asian-Pacific trade summit at which he hopes to move Japan, China and other Asian nations toward more open trade policies.

“That would be a terrible thing to do to the President and to do to the country,” Gore said of a possible defeat for the trade pact. “The other countries around the world . . . are just waiting to see whether or not we have the courage of our convictions, whether we’re willing to walk the walk or just talk the talk.”

But if NAFTA passes, “we will have the leverage we need to start getting growth in the world economy and to remove the barriers to U.S. products in other countries,” the vice president said.

Meanwhile, two leading Democratic opponents in the House, Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri and Majority Whip David E. Bonior of Michigan, said they believe that they have enough votes to ensure defeat.

The agreement must pass by a simple majority in the House. If all members vote, the magic number is 218. If approved, the legislation goes to the Senate, where passage is considered likely.

The White House claimed Sunday that its latest head count indicated it was at least a dozen votes short, while Bonior said opponents believed that they could deliver 222 negative votes.

A poll of congressional members conducted Thursday through Sunday by the Associated Press indicated 203 lawmakers were certain or likely to vote against the pact and 179 were certain or likely to vote for it, leaving 52 undecided. (One of the 435 House seats is vacant.)

A source on the opposition side put the numbers at slightly more than 200 for the Administration and 213 for the opposition. The source, who requested anonymity, said the anti-NAFTA forces were concerned that agreements the Administration had made to win the support of citrus growers had garnered five or six key votes in Florida that the opposition had been hoping to keep.

Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, interviewed Sunday on ABC’s “This Week With David Brinkley,” said the defeat of NAFTA would be a “real tragedy” that could adversely affect not only trade talks with Asia but also efforts to conclude world trade talks being conducted under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

Rejecting claims that the agreement would cause the flight of American jobs to Mexico, where labor costs are lower, Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) said: “A lot of people have lost their jobs in the last decade because there have been a lot of changes in the world. . . . It hasn’t been because of NAFTA.”

NAFTA, in fact, “will generate jobs; it will make us more competitive in international markets against real threats to American jobs coming from Europe and from Japan,” he insisted.

But Gephardt, Bonior and Perot agreed that NAFTA was a bad rendition of a not-so-bad concept.

Gephardt noted on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that he had voted for former President George Bush to negotiate the agreement to lower trade barriers between the United States, Mexico and Canada “because I still think and today believe it’s the right thing to do.”

But Gephardt said: “I don’t think this NAFTA is the right NAFTA,” contending that it tries to accomplish too much too soon and fails to raise living standards and wages in Mexico in incremental steps.

Bonior, appearing on “Meet the Press,” said that “we need a fair trade agreement . . . but this is a bad agreement (and) a bad deal for workers.

“We have about 222 votes going into this weekend, and we think we’re going to hold our vote, because I think the American people are calling their members of Congress and telling them that this is a job-loss bill, this bill is expensive.”

Perot, whose hourlong speech was televised by C-SPAN, insisted not only that NAFTA would prompt U.S. companies to relocate to Mexico for cheaper labor but also that countless Mexicans and their families would migrate to compete for jobs in the United States.

Perot said that by his reading, NAFTA “eliminates all visa or entry requirements for these workers. It allows the workers to bring their families with them into the United States. Fasten on your safety belt: It allows these workers to work in the United States for an unlimited period of time. . . . They can remain citizens of Mexico or apply for U.S. citizenship, at their choice.”

Responding to claims that NAFTA would drive American jobs south of the border, another Administration official, U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor, argued on NBC that NAFTA “allows American products to go south rather than American jobs.

“In its simplicity it builds jobs here at home, builds our business and capital base and makes us more competitive.”

Balzar reported from Seattle and Jackson from Washington. Times staff writer David Lauter in Washington contributed to this story.