It was only this morning that I commented, on this post at QandO, that the anti-NAFTA rhetoric on the part of both Sens. Obama and Clinton was just rhetoric, the customary things you’ve got to say during a political campaign in strong union states like Ohio and, lo! and behold, we’ve got this report from CTV:
Barack Obama has ratcheted up his attacks on NAFTA, but a senior member of his campaign team told a Canadian official not to take his criticisms seriously, CTV News has learned.
Both Obama and Hillary Clinton have been critical of the long-standing North American Free Trade Agreement over the course of the Democratic primaries, saying that the deal has cost U.S. workers’ jobs.
Within the last month, a top staff member for Obama’s campaign telephoned Michael Wilson, Canada’s ambassador to the United States, and warned him that Obama would speak out against NAFTA, according to Canadian sources.
The staff member reassured Wilson that the criticisms would only be campaign rhetoric, and should not be taken at face value.
It seems to me that threats to renegotiate a treaty like NAFTA, whose strength was the assurance that it was a permanent and unshakeable pact and which was negotiated largely under a Republican president (George H. W. Bush) and signed into law by a Democratic one (Bill Clinton), giving at least the presumption of bipartisan support, are just the sort of go-it-alone cowboy diplomacy that Sen. Obama has criticized in George W. Bush. The anti-NAFTA talk is even harder to reconcile with our membership in the WTO, a permanent series of trade negotiations which proceed along by their own momentum under automatic pilot, as they were intended to do.
I don’t find the assurances that Sen. Obama doesn’t really mean what he says particularly reassuring. Do you?
I’d prefer candidates who were bold enough to tell the electorate the truth i.e. that NAFTA isn’t the problem and that globalization is good, not only for China and India which it manifestly is, but for the whole world including the United States but I genuinely sympathize with the Obama campaign. You’ve got to say a lot of stupid things to get elected these days. Take that into account when listening to both the Republican and Democratic candidates in the general.
By the way, I know that lots of economists believe what David Leonhardt wrote in the New York Times:
There is actually a fair amount of agreement among economists on this question. The solution should involve more government investment in infrastructure, the medical sciences, alternative energy and other areas that could produce good new jobs. A more strategic approach to investment, one less based on the whims of individual members of Congress, would also help.
Note the ever-popular “appeal to unnamed authority”, friend of lazy journalists everywhere.
I’m not completely sure how you reconcile that with the reality that the jobs that have prospered the most over the last ten years have been those that have been the most protected, the most able to shield themselves from competition e.g. the government, medicine, banking and financial services, and so on
As someone who is primarily interested in foreign policy in a President, the electoral process presents a conundrum. The discussions can be, er, quite unstatesmenlike. I groaned in this week’s debate when Obama and Clinton took turns insulting the new Russian President. Not that they said anything I would disagree with, but c’mon the guy’s got feelings you know. How deeply do we want Obama to explain the circumstances in which he would violate Pakistan’s territorial sovereignty? And c’mon, if someone really wanted to renegotiate NAFTA, would they start with an ultimatum that if you don’t do what I say, I’m going to tear the whole thing up? I didn’t believe them when they said it.
I wish Fareed Zakaria would have moderated a debate on both sides.
That’s the dirty little secret of presidential politics, PD: the presidency is mostly about foreign relations, the military, and managing the federal bureaucracy rather than about domestic policy. If it were revealed it would make the present crop of Democratic candidates look even worse because they’re not particularly interested in foreign policy.
The same was the case for George W. Bush until international relations hit him over the head.
Note that over the last 50 years every Republican president with the exceptions of Gerald Ford who oopsed into the presidency and George W. Bush were largely interested in foreign policy while every Democratic president of the same period has mostly been interested in domestic policy and politics.