FEBRUARY 14, 2008
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Over at the Huffington Post, Sam Stein marshalls some evidence suggesting Hillary opposed NAFTA from the beginning. It's a compelling brief--particularly this quote from Mickey Kantor (which also caught Ben Smith's eye):
"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."
Which raises an obvious question: If Hillary has been a longtime NAFTA skeptic, why hasn't she made much of this herself? The obvious answer is that she's running on the (generally solid) legacy of her husband's administration, and she can't claim some parts of that legacy while junking others.
I'd suggest two other reasons. First, talking up her opposition to NAFTA might suggest she wasn't very influential in the Clinton administration--it passed, after all--which would undercut a key argument about her experience. Second, it might also play into the narrative Obama has been trying to impose--which is that Washington is a place where people show up with ideals, only to have "boiled" away. The NAFTA episode could be spun as a story about Hillary's accommodation to "the system," which is what Obama vows to change.
I'd add that neither of those critiques would be completely fair. You can be influential without winning on ever major battle. And you can be a good soldier when you lose without selling out. But these would be reasonable ways to use Hillary's NAFTA-opposition against her, and so I'm not surprised she didn't want to broach it.
--Noam Scheiber
2 comments
Better q for HRC would be, Why doesn't Hillary talk up her NAFTA **remedy**?
Nothing would better extend her lead with union members and latinos, and also appeal to thoughtful moderates, than a succinct explanation of 1) the reasons that NAFTA has failed to achieve its core objective of riasing incomes and creating jobs _in Mexico_, hence reducing pressure on wages and low-end jobs in the US., and 2) how to fix NAFTA in short order. Starting with ending the carve-outs for US agribusiness that have led to dumping of subsidized crops in Mexico and the destruction of millions of rural Mexican livelihoods since 1996.
Another benefit of this approach would be that it would show her as serious and thoughtful on a crucial issue that no one, certainly not Obama, is even addressing. The result would either be to wrongfoot Obama or to force Obama to get serious about this extremely serious issue and to put forth his own remedies for this botchjob that has completely failed to achieve its most important objective. Either would be a win for HRC. Not to mention for the debate, and for the country.
- teplukhin2you
February 14, 2008 at 6:52pm
I believe Kantor and Carl Bernstein when they say Hillary Clinton was against NAFTA all along, but it still is a major problem for her candidacy. If she was against it, it would seem to prove she didn't have much say in policy-making in the Clinton White House, outside of health care--and it would also seriously question her backbone among liberal Democrats. After all, she didn't suddenly come out as a fair trader when she ran for Senate in 2000, or in the years she's been in the Senate. Only when she started to run for the Democratic nomination for president did the anti-NAFTA stuff come out. The campaign ad almost writes itself.
My analogy is that if Colin Powell were running, he would constantly be peppered with questions about the Iraq war. This may seem like an outlandish analogy, but to me the only difference is that we know that Powell was involved in Bush's policies on Iraq. We don't know what policy initiatives, besides health care, HIllary was involved in, because she won't tell us. But she claims the cumulative experience of being First Lady has made her qualified to be president. Plausible deniability is not an inspiring campaign slogan.
- alexmparker
February 14, 2008 at 7:01pm