Politics & Power Quote by Ernest Istook

Istook’s line is doing the classic Washington two-step: deflate the drama while quietly moving the goalposts. Calling CAFTA “exaggerated talk” frames critics as hysterical before he ever engages their substance. Then he recasts the agreement as “fairly routine,” a word chosen less to describe the deal than to anesthetize it. If it’s routine, it shouldn’t trigger protests, floor fights, or scrutiny. That’s the intent: normalize controversy into bureaucratic housekeeping.

The subtext sits in the bait-and-switch between “small nations” and “important trade partners.” He concedes the optics problem - the countries are “fairly small,” which to many voters reads as “why bother?” - then flips size into irrelevance. Importance, in this telling, isn’t GDP or population; it’s proximity to U.S. supply chains, export niches, and geopolitical leverage in Central America. He’s arguing that influence and economic entanglement can be disproportionate, which is true, but also strategically convenient: it converts a potentially unpopular free-trade vote into a matter of pragmatic arithmetic.

The Australia comparison is the tell. Australia is a familiar, friendly benchmark; invoking it is meant to shock the audience into thinking, “Wait, really?” It’s a rhetorical shortcut that swaps detailed economic debate for a simple hierarchy claim. Contextually, CAFTA was sold as incremental - a bridge from NAFTA-era ideology to a region where labor, migration, and security anxieties were already politically charged. Istook’s “routine” is less an assessment than an attempt to keep the deal inside the technocratic lane where it’s easiest to pass.