At last weeks 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 Canadas CTV television network reported that, in early February, a representative of the Obama campaign assured Canadian officials that they need not take Obamas 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 Obamas criticism of NAFTA was not sincere? top Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson asked. Its a simple question.
But it wasnt 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 Obamas 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.
News of the memo changed the whole story, and the Clinton campaign quickly sought to take advantage of it. At this point what we have is a lot of statements from the Obama campaign that have been proven to be demonstrably false, Howard Wolfson, Hillary Clintons chief spokesman, told reporters Monday. There is a memo surfacing and circulating in the Canadian government that makes clear that the Obama campaign communicated one thing to the people of Ohio about NAFTA and another thing to the Canadian government about NAFTA.
