NAFTA nations

Also at RCP, Michael Barone discusses the similiarities between the three leaders of the NAFTA nations - the US, Canada and Mexico. In short, they all won very close elections thanks in large part to overwhelming support from the areas of their respective nations where growth is occuring, and notably, the areas from which they lived and worked.

"All three won thanks to huge margins in economically vibrant hinterlands--George W. Bush's Texas, Stephen Harper's Alberta, Vicente Fox's Guanajuato. Calderon carried the Mexican states north of metro Mexico City by 47 to 22 percent over Lopez Obrador. These are the states where you find giant new factories, glistening shopping malls, rising office buildings, new middle-class subdivisions, Wal-Marts, freshly paved highways. This is the Mexico that NAFTA has brought into being. Just as Bush carried most of our fastest-growing states and Harper's Conservatives carried Canada's fastest-growing province, so Mexico's northern states, which produced more than half the nation's population growth from 2000 to 2005, voted PAN. These center-right parties all stand for change--change in the sense of allowing a vibrant private sector to grow and alter our ways of living and making a living. "

The opposition, of course, says it stands for change, but nothing could be further from the truth.