By now, everyone knows the story of how Mark Penn, CEO of Burson-Marsteller and former Chief Strategist for Hillary Clinton's campaign, asked to be relieved of his Chief Strategist duties following his "judgment error" in meeting with a Colombian ambassador to help push the Colombian trade agreement through Congress.
But there is so much more to the story. Keep reading after the fold.
Everyone knows that Hillary Clinton opposes the trade agreement.
"We’ve got to have new trade policies before we have new trade deals," Clinton said last week. "That includes no trade deal with Colombia while violence against trade unionists continues in that country."
And everyone knows that Barack Obama opposes the trade agreement.
"I will oppose the Colombia Free Trade Agreement if President Bush insists on sending it to Congress because the violence against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements," Obama said Wednesday at a meeting of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO in Philadelphia.
The burning question is: Why, two days after his ambassador's meeting with Mark Penn, did Colombian president Alvaro Uribe lash out at Barack Obama while staying silent on the subject of Hillary Clinton's opposition to the deal?
"I deplore the fact that Senator Obama, aspiring to be president of the United States, should be unaware of Colombia's efforts," President Alvaro Uribe said in a statement. "I think it is for political calculations that he is making a statement that does not correspond to Colombia's reality."
Yesterday, Politico's Eamon Javers noted that
The Democratic-leaning advocacy firm the Glover Park Group, former home to Clinton campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson, signed a $40,000 per month contract with the government of Colombia in April of 2007 to promote the very agreement that Clinton now rails against on the presidential campaign trail.
That means Glover Park Group was arguing the same position as Penn's firm. The contentious Clinton strategist and Burson-Marsteller chief executive lost his campaign job over the weekend after The Wall Street Journal revealed that he’d met with Colombian officials to plot strategy on the pact. [...]
Wolfson, who is set to take over many responsibilities from the departing Penn, resigned from Glover Park last year to avoid conflicts of interest but retains an equity interest in the firm.
Wolfson's former involvement with Glover Park and Penn's involvement with Burson-Marsteller shouldn't really shock anyone. (The wisdom of allowing Penn to keep his job as CEO of Burson-Marsteller is a separate issue up for debate.) It goes without saying that if you hire the biggest names in Washington lobbying to run your campaign, there will be conflicts of interest somewhere down the line.
I'm certainly willing to concede the possibility that past conflicts exist in the Obama campaign, although I haven't seen any to date.
But the way this story continues to unfold makes Alvaro Uribe's decision to criticize Obama and not Clinton far more interesting than the conflicts of interest for the PR professionals. It is an omission that implies Uribe believes Clinton could support the trade deal. With each member of her close inner circle who is linked to the attempts to pass the agreement, that silence grows more cacophonic.
And there is one member of Hillary Clinton's inner circle who cannot give up his day job or be fired by the campaign: her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
Last year, Alvaro Uribe awarded Bill Clinton the "Colombia is Passion" award for his work toward improving the image of Colombia in the U.S. and around the world. The referenced article notes,
The Colombian government is trying to counter its negative image among Washington Democrats and secure congressional passage of a free trade agreement signed by Uribe and the Bush administration last year, a deal Uribe considers his biggest foreign policy achievement.
The article also makes clear that it was public knowledge at the time that both Burson-Marsteller and Glover Park were being paid by the Colombian government to negotiate the trade deal.
While Hillary Clinton declined to attend the ceremony honoring President Clinton, he showed up to accept the award and took the opportunity to publicly urge Washington lawmakers to make nice with the country giving him the accolades:
"So those of us who are trying to help, those of us who want to continue progress, owe it to our friends in Colombia to know what they've been through, and to express a little humility in the face of people who have already lost so much, and who are working so hard to build a better tomorrow," Clinton said.
What we as voters and citizens ought to take away from the sum total of these events is not that Colombia is a nation to be demonized, or that Mark Penn made a bad decision in working for opposing clients, but rather that Hillary Clinton's words are dischordant with the words of her advisers and her husband. Even if we cannot draw a direct conclusion that she privately supports a trade agreement she claims to oppose, we should ask her harder questions about her associations and the free pass she's getting from Alvaro Uribe on the subject.