Hillary's Empty Charge and Unequivocal Support of NAFTA

Hillary's Empty Charge and Unequivocal Support of NAFTA
by Republicus
Sat Feb 23, 2008 at 02:44:03 PM PST

Hillary's press conference about Obama's Health Care and NAFTA flyers was perhaps the most ridiculous and dishonest displays of the campaign season. As Obama has argued at every debate in recent memory that Hillary's mandate necessarily penalizes those unable to afford it, I'll limit my remarks to the NAFTA issue.

As someone with considerable experience on the campaign trail, I can say in truth that the NAFTA flyer is one of the most responsibly cited direct mail pieces I have seen in a competitive race. Here's why.

The flyer headline says that Hillary believed NAFTA to be a "boon" to the economy, citing New York Newsday, Press International and Hillary's own book, Living History, in support. Obama's charge on NAFTA is carefully tailored to the New York Newsday report.

"Clinton thinks NAFTA has been a boon to the economy." {New York Newsday, 9/11/2006}

Of course, Hillary's support of NAFTA is hardly a fiction created by New York Newsday; it is a well-documented fact.



According to the Associated Press, three years after President Clinton signed NAFTA into law, Hillary said . . .



At the 1998 World Economic Forum in Davos, Hillary praised corporations for mounting . . .

"a very effective business effort in the U.S. on behalf of NAFTA."

And Bill Clinton recently said on the campaign trail that NAFTA "is basically fair" and that "a lot of people think that NAFTA’s a bigger problem than it is."

Senator Clinton's position on NAFTA has been unambiguous. In contrast, Presidential candidate Clinton's position has been, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported, "a flip-flip to unions and industry sectors" and a "bid to outflank . . . Senator Barack Obama."

If records do matter, as Senator Clinton repeatedly says, she's going to have to answer for hers with more than a temper tantrum if she hopes to compete in Ohio and Texas

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/2/23/162727/254/78/462675

DU or in Obama PR handouts. Seems cost sharing and preventing the gamimg of the system are too hard for this fellow of the "left" to plan on getting passed into law.

Nafta 3 years into it had produced 900,000 new jobs in the US.

talk about smear/lie Empty Charge ridiculous and dishonest displays -

Why should anyone believe her when she's on record supporting NAFTA originally?

She's done the same with outsourcing.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x4725455

Conniving also comes to mind...:think:

...

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.

It fell to Mickey Kantor, the U.S. Trade Representative responsible for implementing NAFTA, to reason with Hillary. One day in August, he sat her down on a bench behind the White House and tried to strike a compromise. "I said, 'If you want to drop NAFTA, we can kill it, but we shouldn't,'" Kantor recalled. "I said, 'The way to do it is to introduce health care, spend a month on it, and then do NAFTA, then go back to health care.'" With misgivings, Hillary acquiesced to the proposed sequence.

...

So why didn't we hear such protests from Hillary Clinton during her husband's administration?

"The whole time that she was first lady," said Robert Shapiro, the undersecretary of commerce during the Clinton White House years, "she, like everybody else... not supposed to deviate from the position of the administration. There is no freedom of speech in there, and that certainly applies to a first lady."

...

More recently, at the Las Vegas Democratic Debate on November 15, 2007, she offered the following, more concise declaration: "NAFTA was a mistake to the extent that it did not deliver on what we had hoped it would."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/02/14/did-hillary-clinton-reall_n_86674.html

She may have been against NAFTA, but I think she was too equivocating with her words that it was difficult for people to tell on the campaign trail where she lay.

her book when she was free to discuss it. Just very disingenuous imo, and her faux outrage at the mailers takes the cake.

I guess she hoped people would want to return to the Clinton days compared to now, so it would've been more consistent if she supported NAFTA in order to try to remind folks how much better it was under Bill. I'm not trying to justify her choices. Those are hers to defend. Frankly, I advocate radically reforming NAFTA or simply abolishing it entirely if it's too far from saving. She probably should've come out against it, and now Obama is eating into her lead in Ohio.

The absurdity of her denial on this is pretty breathtaking.

K&R

switch his positions within minutes.

During THIS campaign, she has said it is not working as planned, she is going to call a halt, study and refine.

Big fat non-truth tellers.

on supporting NAFTA before she didn't, all she had to do was say so. Same with her IWR vote. But she doesn't admit to mistakes, same as the dim one. That scares me.

who's trying to fuzz up this issue and why didn't you address my original question, RE: Clinton apologizing, for anything?


http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN2414727720080225?sp=true

Asked how other countries should interpret his position, Obama responded that he supported free trade but wanted it to be fair.

"What the world should interpret is my consistent position, which is I believe in trade," he said after meeting with workers at a manufacturing plant in Ohio.

"I just want to make sure that the rules of the road apply to everybody and they are fair and that they reflect the interests of workers and not just corporate profits."

NAFTA went into force in 1994 while former President Bill Clinton held office.

Hillary Clinton, who called the pact a success in her memoir, says she has a plan to review and fix it and accuses Obama of complaining but not having a proposal to alter it.

Obama said he opposed NAFTA from the start and U.S. workers were not the only ones to suffer from its effects. Wages and benefits in Mexico had not been improved by the treaty, he said.

Looking forward, Obama said the World Trade Organization's Doha round of trade talks should have provisions that reject child labor and poor environmental standards while creating opportunities for developing nations to sell their goods to wealthy countries.

"When we think about the Doha round of trade agreements, for instance, I think it is perfectly appropriate for us to say that very poor countries should be able to export into wealthier countries on a basis that allows them to lift their standard of living," he said.

"We've got to have some minimal standards and we've got to have enforcement around things like safety standards."