NAFTA deals enter the presidential debate

Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards spent years trying to make NAFTA and the impact of global investment deals (mis-labeled "free trade" deals) a major election-year issue. But it's taken a recent spat this week between front-runners Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to inject this important issue into the political debate.

As columnist David Sirota noted earlier this week, Obama has been embracing many of Edwards' populist themes since Edwards left the race, including attacking Clinton's record on NAFTA and investment deals. Here's this from a recent Obama speech:

It's a Washington where decades of trade deals like NAFTA and China have been signed with plenty of protections for corporations and their profits, but none for our environment or our workers who've seen factories shut their doors and millions of jobs disappear; workers whose right to organize and unionize has been under assault for the last eight years.

As we've reported before, NAFTA and its legislative spawn like CAFTA are hot topics in the South, where these deals have wreaked much of their havoc.

In 2005, the Economic Policy Institute did a breakdown of which states had fared the worst since NAFTA was signed in 1993. Out of the 1 million + jobs that were "displaced" by NAFTA, here are the states that lost the most in terms of their total employment:

Michigan (-63,148, -1.44%)
Indiana (-35,157, -1.19%)
Mississippi (-11,630, -1.03%)
Tennessee (-25,588, -0.94%)
Ohio (-49,886, -0.92%)
Rhode Island (-4,482, -0.91%)
Wisconsin (-25,403, -0.90%)
Arkansas (-10,321, -0.89%)
North Carolina (-34,150, -0.89%)
New Hampshire (-5,502, -0.87%)

So Southern voters are listening carefully when Obama charges Clinton with saying that NAFTA was a "boon" to our nation's economy. But did she really think that?

Sam Stein of the Huffington Post says that Hillary Clinton privately had misgivings about NAFTA but couldn't voice them for fear of derailing a cornerstone of her husband's economic agenda. For evidence, he looks to quotes like this one from Clinton biographer Carl Bernstein on CNN:

"'Bill,'" [Bernstein] recalled Hillary Clinton as saying, "'you are doing Republican economics when you are doing NAFTA.' She was against NAFTA. And if she would somehow come out and tell the real story of what she fought for in the White House and failed in a big argument with her husband she would end up moving much closer to those [John] Edwards followers."

But Sirota has plenty of counter-evidence, in the form of Hillary Clinton's enthusiastic public statements about NAFTA's promise:

Hillary Clinton has made statements unequivocally trumpeting NAFTA as the greatest thing since sliced bread. The Buffalo News reports that back in 1998, Clinton attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and thanked praised corporations for mounting "a very effective business effort in the U.S. on behalf of NAFTA." Yes, you read that right: She traveled to Davos to thank corporate interests for their campaign ramming NAFTA through Congress.

On November 1, 1996, United Press International reported that on a trip to Brownsville, Texas, Clinton "touted the president's support for the North American Free Trade Agreement, saying it would reap widespread benefits in the region."

The Associated Press followed up the next day noting that Hillary Clinton touted the fact that "the president would continue to support economic growth in South Texas through initiatives such as the North American Free Trade Agreement."

In her memoir, Clinton wrote, "Senator Dole was genuinely interested in health care reform but wanted to run for President in 1996. He couldn't hand incumbent Bill Clinton any more legislative victories, particularly after Bill's successes on the budget, the Brady bill and NAFTA."

Sirota has a good point. We can always second-guess how a politician privately feels about an issue. Do they really agree? What do they have to say for political reasons?

But at the end of the day, all we have on the record are a candidate's public statements and actions. And in this case, if Hillary Clinton had misgivings about NAFTA, she didn't go out of her way to demonstrate that to the world; in fact, she did the opposite.