John and Elizabeth Edwards ran a valiant campaign to bring Democrats and others in close touch with the scandal that is poverty in this rich country.
They advocated admirably for us all to go back to New Orleans and start to break the deadlock and right the wrongs that have been visited on the working families and the poor there. They travelled the country to bring the stories of the mill workers and steel workers and thousands of others who lost lifetime jobs when the manufacturing sector took on foreign addresses. And they talked about the evils of NAFTA for the people in other countries. (Hillary shares the Edwards' concern and has made several major proposals to continue to address their efforts. more later)
Now that the Edwards campaign has been suspended, Senator Obama has begun to speak about NAFTA. He has his eye on primaries in states that have been especially hard hit, where many displaced workers support Senator Edwards or Senator Clinton. His material and surrogates are giving voters the impression that Hillary is responsible for NAFTA because Bill came to support it.
As early as 1992 Bill Clinton was paying close attention to the trade policies under consideration at the time. He was being advised vigorously to carry on the plans of George H. W. Bush culminating in NAFTA. There was a lot of heated back and forth on whether or not Clinton should go ahead with the policy according to Mickey Kantor, US Commerce Secretary. He says Hillary was always against it from the start.
Senator Obama has indicated in several ways that this is not true and now has started running ads in states very hard hit by NAFTA trying to encourage voters to think of Hillary as responsible for their job losses.
Unfortunately for Senator Obama, there are numerous witnesses to the facts and he is being dishonest about the facts so that he can benefit personally from fooling voters.
Several biographers and others recording that period attest to Hillary's active disapproval as outlined in Sam Stein's current piece on Huffington Post
Stein writes February 14, 2008 in a piece titled:
Did Hillary Clinton Really Suport NAFTA? Aides, Biographers say,"No"...
..."In August in 92, we had to make a decision," Mickey Kantor the former U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Clinton adviser, and free trade advocate recalled for the Huffington Post. "President Clinton had to make a decision as governor, whether or not he would support [George H.W. Bush's] NAFTA, and of course he did... Hillary Clinton was one of the great skeptics in the discussion as to whether he should do. So she was always skeptical beginning in 1992 and onward."
Indeed, as Kantor went on to note, Hillary Clinton long held reservations over the labor and environmental fallouts of the free trade agreement...
There were many discussions in which she expressed her reservations, disapproval, even outrage at the consideration being given "Republican Economics".
Clinton biographer Sally Bedell Smith writes in her book "For Love of Politics," her disapproval of the trade agreement was both political and philosophical.
The economic team and other key advisors, including Mack McLarty, Mickey Kantor, and David Gergen, were likewise urging Bill to use his momentum to push or congressional ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)...Liberal Democrats, including Hillary, opposed it primarily because it could take jobs away from American workers. But as an advocate of global economic cooperation, Bill was drawn to its free-trade philosophy.
Carl Berstein, who researched a biography on the period, spoke about Hillary's fight against NAFTA on CNN.
Stein writes of Bernstein:
..."'Bill,'" he recalled Hillary Clinton as saying, "'you are doing Republican economics when you are doing NAFTA.' She was against NAFTA. And if she would somehow come out and tell the real story of what she fought for in the White House and failed in a big argument with her husband she would end up moving much closer to those [John] Edwards followers."
Hillary has not defended herself on NAFTA; she just talks about what she wants to do about it. (The voice of the White House is that of the President; people who live there are usually discreet about their contrary policy conversations with the President.)
One of the hallmarks of Senator Clinton's campaign for the Presidency has been the large group of detailed plans she has developed around some of her most pressing priorities. Among them are bringing the troups home, universal healh care and wellness, National Service for college and technical training, mortgage crises relief, Pre-K child development and massive foreign policy initiatives and others.
Her comprehensive plan for renewing New Orleans and beginning to correct some of the horrible mistakes and injustice there was announced early last summer.(It must be a very helpful plan because Senator Obama took five of the major parts of it and announced them as his own right before the Lousiana Primary last week!)
Hillary has also made basic changes in our trade policy one of her significant economic proposals. She has some serious plans for revitalizing some of the hardest his areas of the manufacturing sector, starting with taking away the tax incentives to move more jobs offshore. Her plan includes environmental and worker protections in trade partner countries and improving our bargaining power by fiscal changes that make us less likely to be "bargaining with our banker" with countries we borrowed so much money from.
Her plan addresses retooling and retraining, of course but it focuses on the kinds of jobs that can't be moved! Her green collar jobs program includes 5,000,000 immovable jobs right away in retrofitting and upgrading energy efficiencies and conservation and a massive renewal of the national infrastructure that rennovates the bridges and highways, schools and water systems. She includes plans to develop millions of new jobs in alternative energy in her energy independence project. And she has figured out how to pay for all this responsibly.
The outcome of the Clinton plan will be millions of new jobs, quickly and often in the places hardest hit by NAFTA. It is really in the interest of these voters to look closely at what she plans and consider the effect on their lives. She is trying to preserve the basic concepts of opening trade while fixing so much of what was wrong with NAFTA....because she has been against it from the start!
I encourage Obama and Edwards supporters to try to help Senator Obama set aside the dishonesty and find another way to appeal to poor and jobless voters. If he woos votes by being dishonest about Hillary's relationship to NAFTA, then he needs to work as hard on coming up with plans to repair the NAFTA damage as Hillary has and he needs to do it fast enough to start giving those voters he appropriates from Edwards and Clinton some immediate relief.
Oh, yes. And he needs to tell those voters that he has voted for NAFTA to be extended.