Who Cares About NAFTA?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – I always feel slightly ill when I see Clinton and Obama competing to say who thought NAFTA was worse first. There’s all sorts of reasons for this reaction. For one, Clinton is either being mendacious or stupid by claiming that she a. opposed NAFTA consistently and b. takes credit for all the accomplishments of the Clinton administration..except NAFTA. Not to mention that she had defended all of Bill’s recond, including NAFTA in the past. With Obama, the feeling is more one of disappointment. His “opposition” to NAFTA is weird. As David Leonhardt points out in his excellent column on the issue, neither Clinton nor Obama supports overturning NAFTA, instead they want to tinker with the buerecratic architecture of the bill. What’s even more annoying (but also reassuring) is that Obama is closer to the center than Clinton on trade. If you put aside NAFTA, Clinton was originally the one pounding Obama on trade. It’s just that her breathtaking two-timing on what she thought about NAFTA when has given Obama an opening to criticize her from her left in a very anti-trade state.
Call me naive, but this anti-trader ain’t the real Obama. In the Audacity of Hope, he makes the social democratic argument for trade very convincingly (more trade, more social insurance). In the Senate, he’s supported the Peru Trade Deal, which has pissed off true-blue anti-traders (Matt Stoller et al). What we’re seeing here is just some true-blue pandering. He knows that people in Ohio have seen their median incomes fall (but not in the 90s, immediately after NAFTA was passed), he knows that manufacutring jobs are leaving (not to Mexico, but to technological advancement and China) and he knows that many Democrats see NAFTA as the height of Clintonian caving to Robert Rubin and his gang of free market Dems. So yes, it’s disappointing that he’s giving credence to such uninformed, reactionary rhetoric, but seeing as he has literally zero policy substance that matches up with the tone of his words, I’m not too worried. And it’s not like Bush or McCain is really going to get us to complete the Doha round anyway.
