Dem’s stance on NAFTA unclear

With the recent resignation of Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist Mark Penn due to his involvement with a free trade deal between the United States and Columbia, it may be interesting now to note where the candidates actually stand on free trade.

Both Democrats harp on each other, saying their stances on the North American Free Trade Agreement are not backed up by their actions. But is this true?

If candidates claim particular policy positions they should be able to back them up with their votes and show with their voting record in the Senate. They need to understand that their positions are not just political plays.

NAFTA removed barriers to trade and investment between the U.S., Canada and Mexico, and both Democratic candidates have urged a renegotiation.

They started to tout this idea heavily prior to the Texas and Ohio primaries. These states, along with Pennsylvania (the next competition), have large portions of blue-collar workers – the constituency most negatively affected by free trade and who also make up a large part of the Democratic Party’s historic base.

Since NAFTA’s inception in the 1990s, blue-collar jobs were stripped from these areas and taken to Mexico, where the work force is cheap and labor laws are lax.

Unlike the Democrats, McCain is a full-blooded supporter of free trade. He has always supported NAFTA, saying on a Des Moines Registrar video: “NAFTA has created millions of jobs.”

He also relates free trade to national security, saying we need to maintain our friendship with Canada so they can continue to aid in the war on terror.

“One of our greatest assets in Afghanistan are our Canadian friends, we need our Canadian friends and we need their continued support in Afghanistan,” McCain told the Associated Press in February.

McCain knows where he stands, but the Democratic candidates’ stances seem far fishier.

Clinton, who is desperately trying to convince people she always had doubts about NAFTA, cannot really back up her position with her history.  First, it was her husband who signed NAFTA while he was president, and as late as 2004 Hilary Clinton appeared to support the trade agreement on MSNBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“I think, on balance, NAFTA has been good for New York and good for America,” she said.

Her voting record does not entirely jive with her position either. Though Clinton voted against CAFTA, which is similar to NAFTA except it includes several Caribbean nations, she did vote for free trade agreements with Oman, Chile and Singapore. 

The United States’ largest union organization, the AFL-CIO, has officially opposed all three agreements saying on their Web site that they all cost American jobs. Both democrats have courted AFL-CIO endorsements.

A petition the AFL-CIO sent to President George W. Bush opposing the Oman agreement in 2006 condemns it for only superficially considering Omanian workers’ rights.

“There is no right to freely organize and bargain collectively; workers do not have the right to association,” said the petition, referring to conditions in Oman.

Congressional Republicans sponsored all three agreements, with House Minority Leader John Boehner sponsoring the Oman agreement and former House Majority Leader Tom Delay sponsoring the Chilean and Singaporean agreements.

Barack Obama’s record doesn’t look all that better, though as with most positions he gets a free ride because he is so green he did not have to vote for many of these agreements.

Along with Clinton, he voted against the CAFTA bill, but also along with Clinton, he voted for the Oman agreement. And both candidates missed a Peru trade agreement vote due to their continuous campaigning. However, this agreement was not for free trade; it just laid out the rules governing trade between Peru and the U.S.

Obama also has to account for the remarks of one of his senior advisors, Austan Goolsbee, made to a Canadian diplomat in February. The advisor told the diplomat that Obama’s anti-NAFTA rhetoric was just campaign talk; he is simply trying to drum up votes but that in reality he would not change the NAFTA agreement. His campaign denies this, but unlike Clinton who fired Penn for his missteps, Goolsbee is still employed by the Obama campaign.

When McCain addressed the Obama-NAFTA issue he said the candidate was not offering “straight talk.” This would be a good way to characterize both Democrats’ stances on free trade.