One of President Barack Obama’s favorite points to make in the intra-party dispute over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement with twelve Pacific Rim nations is that his opponents rehash the same old, tired anti-globalization arguments. As Obama told the Wall Street Journal on Monday, “There has been a confluence of anti-global engagement from both elements of the right and elements of the left that I think [is] a big mistake.”

But Obama’s arguments are old and tired, too. They come from a playbook for how the last Democratic administration sold a free trade deal opposed by unions and the party base. Watch this 1993 CNN debate on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Vice President Al Gore and Ross Perot:

That remarkable debate, where a sitting vice president and a former presidential candidate took phone calls with Larry King, happened eight days before the final NAFTA vote in Congress. It is remembered now mostly for Perot’s continual anger at being interrupted; “Can I finish!” became a Dana Carvey SNL tag line, and Perot turned into a national joke. Gore earned praise for keeping Perot off-balance with aggressive debate tactics, but the core arguments should all sound familiar. Let’s go through them, one by one:

This Time Is Different

Gore made a distinction between previous trade deals with Japan and China, and NAFTA, with its side agreements on labor and the environment. Critics of NAFTA “confuse the bad trade deals in the past with this one,” Gore said. “We've got a commitment for the first time in history to use trade sanctions to compel the enforcement of their environmental standards.”

This mirrors Obama’s claim about inferior prior deals—including NAFTA. “Not every trade deal has lived up to the hype,” Obama acknowledged to Vox’s Matt Yglesias. He’s even suggested that TPP, which includes Mexico and Canada as signatories, can fix NAFTA. Democrats sell these agreements by renouncing the past, in an attempt to insulate themselves from criticism about trade.