NAFTAgate

**Ironduke** · 03-03-2008, 18:51 PM

Quote:

Obama Denies Assuring Canada on NAFTA

SAN ANTONIO - Barack Obama said Monday that his campaign never gave Canada back-channel assurances that his harsh words about the North American Free Trade Agreement were for political show -- despite the disclosure of a Canadian memo indicating otherwise.

According to the memo obtained by The Associated Press, Obama's senior economic adviser told Canadian officials in Chicago that the debate over free trade in the Democratic presidential primary campaign was "political positioning" and that Obama was not really protectionist.

The adviser, Austan Goolsbee, said his comments to those officials were misinterpreted by the author, Joseph DeMora, who works for the Canadian consulate in Chicago and attended the meeting.

In Carrollton, Texas, Obama told reporters: "Nobody reached out to the Canadians to try to assure them of anything."

Asked why he had appeared to deny a report last week that such a meeting had taken place, Obama said: "That was the information I had at the time."

The original report by CTV in Canada suggested an Obama emissary had reached out to officials at the Canadian Embassy in Washington. Embassy officials artfully denied any such contact had been made with them.

As it turned out, the meeting took place in Chicago instead, with Canadian Consul General Georges Rioux and DeMora taking notes.

Obama said that one of his advisers had been invited by someone at the consulate to visit and discuss trade.

"The Canadian Embassy confirmed that he said everything I said on the campaign trail," Obama asserted.

"We think the terms of NAFTA have to be altered" to strengthen environmental and labor protections, he said.

The memo says: "Noting anxiety among many U.S. domestic audiences about the U.S. economic outlook, Goolsbee candidly acknowledged the protectionist sentiment that has emerged, particularly in the Midwest, during the primary campaign."

It went on: "He cautioned that this messaging should not be taken out of context and should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans."

Goolsbee disputed the characterization.

"This thing about 'it's more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans,' that's this guy's language," Goolsbee said of DeMora. "He's not quoting me.

"I certainly did not use that phrase in any way," he said.

NAFTA is widely opposed in economically depressed Ohio, which holds its presidential primary Tuesday and is a battleground between Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Clinton said Monday that Obama's campaign gave the Canadians "the old wink-wink."

"I think that's the kind of difference between talk and action that I've been talking about," Clinton told reporters while campaigning in Ohio. "It raises questions about Senator Obama coming to Ohio and giving speeches against NAFTA."

Both candidates said in a debate in Cleveland last week that they would use the threat of pulling out of NAFTA to persuade Canada and Mexico to negotiate more protections for workers and the environment in the agreement.

The memo obtained by the AP was widely distributed within the Canadian government. It is more than 1,300 words and covers many topics that DeMora said were discussed in the Feb. 8 "introductory meeting."

Obama Denies Assuring Canada on NAFTA -- Newsday.com

**Ironduke** · 03-04-2008, 03:17 AM

From a recent Pew Poll:

Quote:

Clinton Draws More Support Among Democrats

The vast majority of Democratic voters say they would support either Obama or Clinton over McCain. But in an Obama-McCain matchup, 14% of Democratic voters say they would support McCain, compared with 8% who would do so if Clinton is the nominee.

One-in-five white Democrats (20%) say that they will vote for McCain over Obama, double the percentage who say they would switch sides in a Clinton-McCain matchup (10%).

Roughly the same number of Democrats age 65 and older say they will vote for McCain if Obama is the party's choice (22%). Obama also suffers more defections among lower income and less educated Democratic voters than does Clinton.

In addition, female Democrats look at the race differently depending on the matchup. While 93% of women in the party say they would vote for Clinton over McCain, just 79% say they would support Obama over McCain.

A quarter of Democrats (25%) who back Clinton for the nomination say they would favor McCain in a general election test against Obama. The "defection" rate among Obama's supporters if Clinton wins the nomination is far lower; just 10% say they would vote for McCain in November, while 86% say they would back Clinton.

Section 1: General Election Patterns of Support: Obama Has The Lead, But Potential Problems Too

**Ironduke** · 03-05-2008, 00:16 AM

Quote:

Is Obama Lying About NAFTAGate?
He certainly doesn’t seem to be telling the whole truth.

By Byron York

For the last several months, the tone of the Democratic presidential debate on the issue of trade has worried government officials in Canada and Mexico. Would a President Barack Obama or a President Hillary Clinton actually pull the U.S. out of the North American Free Trade Agreement? It’s a nightmare scenario in Ottawa and Mexico City — not to mention Washington — and Canadian and Mexican officials have tried as best they can to gauge just how sincere the criticisms of NAFTA coming from Obama and Clinton really are.

Those criticisms have been particularly intense in the run-up to today’s primary in economically struggling Ohio. At last week’s debate in Cleveland, Obama and Clinton dueled to see who could be more anti-NAFTA; Obama won, at least rhetorically, by promising to “use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage” to renegotiate NAFTA on his own terms.

Did he mean it? Or was he just telling steelworkers in Ohio what they wanted to hear? That is the question behind the first real scandal of the Obama campaign. And while the campaign has made several statements on the issue, there are growing indications that officials there are not telling the whole story.

It began last week, when Canada’s CTV television network reported that, in early February, a representative of the Obama campaign assured Canadian officials that they need not take Obama’s NAFTA threats seriously, that those threats were just political rhetoric intended to win Midwestern primaries. The campaign, and the Canadian government, initially denied everything. “The Canadian ambassador issued a statement saying that the story was absolutely false,” top Obama adviser Susan Rice said Thursday night on MSNBC. “There had been no such contact. There had been no discussions on NAFTA.” Obama himself, asked about the story the next day, said, “It did not happen.”

But it turned out that there had been contact, and something did indeed happen. Later news reports identified the Obama adviser as Austan Goolsbee, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago who serves as a senior adviser to the Obama campaign. Those reports said Goolsbee met with officials at the Canadian consulate in Chicago, where the NAFTA discussion allegedly took place.

The Clinton campaign picked up the story. “Has Austan Goolsbee had any contact with anyone in the Canadian government, in the Canadian embassy, or tried to send a message to individuals there to indicate that Senator Obama’s criticism of NAFTA was not sincere?” top Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson asked. “It’s a simple question.”

But it wasn’t one the Obama campaign was inclined to answer, and as the weekend began, the campaign continued to deny everything. On Friday, The New York Observer reached Goolsbee himself. “It is a totally inaccurate story,” Goolsbee said. “I did not call these people.”

Then a report from the Associated Press pulled the rug out from under Obama. The report cited a memo written as a record of the February 8 meeting between Goolsbee and a man named Georges Rioux, the Canadian consul general in Chicago. The document was written by Joseph DeMora, a consulate staffer who was in the meeting.

“Noting anxiety among many U.S. domestic audiences about the U.S. economic outlook, Goolsbee candidly acknowledged the protectionist sentiment that has emerged, particularly in the Midwest, during the primary campaign,” the memo said, according to AP. “He cautioned that this messaging should not be taken out of context and should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans.”

In another part of the memo, according to AP, Goolsbee repeated some of Obama’s rhetoric on NAFTA but sought to downplay its consequences. Goolsbee, according to the memo, “was frank in saying that the primary campaign has been necessarily domestically focused, particularly in the Midwest, and that much of the rhetoric that may be perceived to be protectionist is more reflective of political maneuvering than policy. On NAFTA, Goolsbee suggested that Obama is less about fundamentally changing the agreement and more in favour of strengthening/clarifying language on labour mobility and environment and trying to establish these as more ‘core’ principles of the agreement.”

Read more here: Byron York on Barack Obama & NAFTA on National Review Online

**astralis** · 03-05-2008, 01:58 AM

not really much of a "scandal", just politicians doing what politicians do with empty talk...

**Ironduke** · 03-05-2008, 02:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by astralis

not really much of a "scandal", just politicians doing what politicians do with empty talk...

This scandal seems to have hurt his credibility badly, as the economy is the most important issue to Democrats and independents. Most Democrats think NAFTA had led to big job losses.

**Shek** · 03-07-2008, 07:04 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ironduke

Most Democrats think NAFTA had led to big job losses.

Because the sectors they quote as losing jobs to NAFTA were growing before NAFTA went into effect

Using Ohio specifically, the unemployment rate was 6.5% in December 1993, the month just prior to NAFTA going into effect on January 1, 1994. The unemployment rate has not been as high since. Whatever jobs may have been lost to NAFTA have been replaced.

03-05-2008, 01:58 AM	#4 (permalink)
astralis *Foreign Service* Moderator Lei Feng Protege Join Date: 08-23-05 Location: Washington, DC Posts: 2,944 Country:	not really much of a "scandal", just politicians doing what politicians do with empty talk... __________________ Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present. -Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

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