Obama and Clinton shift the debate to free trade

Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton ended their televised Austin, Texas, debate last week on a high note. But, since then, their campaigns have been outrightly confrontational. The tone is likely to carry over into their Cleveland, Ohio, debate late this week and into March 4 voting in Ohio, Texas, Vermont, and Rhode Island. Clinton, facing elimination from the race, has adopted an angry campaign persona and Obama is not turning the other cheek. Ironically, the hottest debate has been over an issue where both candidates have been trimming and grandstanding: the North American Free Trade Agreement and international trade (see below).
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Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton ended their televised Austin, Texas, debate last week on a high note. But, since then, their campaigns have been outrightly confrontational. The tone is likely to carry over into their Cleveland, Ohio, debate late this week and into March 4 voting in Ohio, Texas, Vermont, and Rhode Island. Clinton, facing elimination from the race, has adopted an angry campaign persona and Obama is not turning the other cheek. Ironically, the hottest debate has been over an issue where both candidates have been trimming and grandstanding: the North American Free Trade Agreement and international trade (see below).

Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton ended their televised Austin, Texas, debate last week on a high note. But, since then, their campaigns have been outrightly confrontational. The tone is likely to carry over into their Cleveland, Ohio, debate late this week and into March 4 voting in Ohio, Texas, Vermont, and Rhode Island. Clinton, facing elimination from the race, has adopted an angry campaign persona and Obama is not turning the other cheek. Ironically, the hottest debate has been over an issue where both candidates have been trimming and grandstanding: the North American Free Trade Agreement and international trade (see below). Away from the Obama-Clinton exchanges, Sen. John McCain appeared over the weekend to have a temporary upperhand in his conflict with The New York Times over the paper's story alleging he had an irregular personal and professional relationship with a young female lobbyist. Republican conservatives, heretofore expressing doubt about McCain, rallied to his support against their common Times enemy. Longer term, however, this will be a difficult argument for McCain to win. Since his 2000 presidential race, he has presented himself as an independent, cranky opponent of wasteful federal spending, lobbyist influence and other Washington, DC-as-usual practices. Media for the most part have bought into his self-drawn picture. Behind the scenes, though, knowledgeable capital and Arizona analysts have known that McCain had close relationships with lobbyists and had intervened frequently for special interests and the politically connected. National media will now examine the relationships and interventions -- likely one at a time, and over a continuing period, forcing McCain into a series of uncomfortable responses. It will be political water torture, if not waterboarding, which McCain has denounced. Almost unnoticed Sunday was Ralph Nader's predictable announcement of his quadrennial presidential candidacy as an independent. Nader, in 2000, drew enough votes in south Florida from Vice President Al Gore to create the hanging-chad controversy which fouled that election. Barring some totally unforeseen circumstance, his candidacy this year should have negligible impact. Now, about NAFTA and trade. A North Amerian Free Trade agreement had been floated as an idea through the 1960s and 1970s and been generally dismissed by international trade specialists who saw global, mulilateral liberalization (through what is now the World Trade Organization) as a far preferable way to bring down barriers to greater flows of goods and services, contributing to global economic growth. A NAFTA deal, among other things, would awkwardly meld the open and advanced economies of the United States and Canada with the protected and still developing economy of Mexico. It also would discriminate by definition against neighboring countries in the Caribbean and Central America. In the 1980s, however, the notion of NAFTA became respectable. Free traders who previously had scorned it saw it as a way to pry open and liberalize the corrupt, protected Mexican economy. Mexican President Carlos Salinas became a strong advocate and convinced President George H.W. Bush to jump on board. The issue came to a head in the 1992 Presidential campaign -- especially on the Democratic side, where disaffected workers and unions in industrial states such as Ohio and Michigan were increasingly seeing international trade as a threat. President Bush, seeking reelection, supported it. Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton temporized but, in the end, also endorsed it, mainly because NAFTA had become seen by then as an unlikely litmus test as to whether politicians supported an open or closed global economic system. As president, Clinton got congressional approval for the treaty, but only narrowly and only because of Republican support. In the ensuing 15 years, numerous analyses have been made of NAFTA's effects. The bottom line: They have been marginal at most. Some American states have gained jobs because of NAFTA; others have lost them. Far greater impacts on the American economy have come from overall globalization -- from effects, that is, of greater competitiveness by the products and services of other industrial and third-world countries and by such factors as our own huge international debt burden. Globalization, as NAFTA, has brought benefits to some regions and sectors, adjustment to others. To rage against globalization, or against NAFTA (as a regional liberalization), is about as effective a tactic as raging against the effects of the moon on tides. Some industries and regions will never recapture jobs lost in non-competitive industries. New-economy industries, and regions with skilled and educated workforces, will continue to benefit. Both Obama and Clinton have in their campaigns blamed "bad trade deals" and NAFTA for economic ills in, for instance, Ohio, site of one of the two decisive final primary contests. In Texas, too, there is great concern about NAFTA's effects, including anxiety over a fictional "NAFTA Highway" to be built from the Rio Grande north toward Canada, as precursor to a political merger of the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Both candidates have made promises they will not be able to keep if elected President. Their policy advisors, behind the scenes, are telling them new investment, education, skills traning and retraining, and other longer-term measures are the way to revive American regions that have become trade losers. But their political advisors are telling them to say and do whatever is necessary to win primary contests in such places as Ohio. Better to win by grandstanding than to lose by truth-telling, is the pollsters' and consultants' counsel. The Democratic Party, until the past 20 years, was the party of free trade. President Kennedy's Trade Expansion Act of 1962 provided a landmark breakthrough toward a series of global trade deals which have benefited the United States immensely. But that posture has eroded until, now, such deals can only be enacted with Republican votes, joining the votes of the remaining minority percentage of Democrats who support free trade. The present Obama-Clinton dialogue is shrinking that percentage even more.

  

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About the Authors & Contributors

Ted Van Dyk

Ted Van Dyk

Ted Van Dyk has been active in national policy and politics since 1961, serving in the White House and State Department and as policy director of several Democratic presidential campaigns. He is author of Heroes, Hacks and Fools and numerous essays in national publications. You can reach him in care of editor@crosscut.com.