Originally Posted by
stdreb27
http:///forum/post/2488703
LORAIN, Ohio (AP) - Barack Obama accused Democratic presidential rival Hillary Rodham Clinton on Sunday of trying to walk away from a long record of support for NAFTA, the free trade agreement that he said has cost 50,000 jobs in Ohio, site of next week's primary.
At the same time, he said attempts to repeal the trade deal "would probably result in more job losses than job gains in the United States."
One day after Clinton angrily accused him of distorting her record on the North American Free Trade Agreement in mass mailings, the Illinois senator was eager to rekindle the long-distance debate, using passages from the former first lady's book as well as her own words.
"Ten years after NAFTA passed, Senator Clinton said it was good for America," Obama said. "Well, I don't think NAFTA has been good for America—and I never have."
"The fact is, she was saying great things about NAFTA until she started running for president," Obama told an audience at a factory that makes wall board, located in a working class community west of Cleveland.
"A couple years after it passed, she said NAFTA was a 'free and fair trade agreement' and that it was 'proving its worth.' And in 2004, she said, "I think, on balance, NAFTA has been good for New York and America," he said.
A spokesman for Clinton, Phil Singer, said the former first lady was critical of NAFTA long before she ran for president. He cited remarks from March 2000 in which she said, "What happened to NAFTA I think was we inherited an agreement that we didn't get everything we should have got out of it in my opinion. I think the NAFTA agreement was flawed."
Singer also said that in 2004 in Illinois, Obama spoke positively of the trade agreement, saying the United States had "benefited enormously" from exports under NAFTA.
From the Democratic Daily
Obama and NAFTA
by Pamela Leavey
February 23rd, 2008 @ 7:06 pm
Why is Barack Obama attacking Hillary Clinton on NAFTA when his voting record on trade since he’s been in the Senate is essentially identical to Clinton’s voting record on trade?
Obama went on record that he was supporting NAFTA expansion months ago. In fact, as David Sirota reported at the time, Obama was “the first presidential candidate to officially declare his/her support for the NAFTA expansion moving through the Congress.” Sirota wrote:
His announcement is not necessarily surprising, considering he was the keynote speaker at the launch of the Hamilton Project — a Wall Street front group working to drive a wedge between Democrats and organized labor on globalization issues. His announcement comes just days after a Wall Street Journal poll found strong bipartisan opposition to lobbyist-written NAFTA-style trade policies.
Barack Obama always seems to want to have his cake and eat it too. As I have noted here many times in the past, Obama claims he was against the war in Iraq, but he voted to fund it and he voted against Kerry Feingold. Now he’s attacking Hillary Clinton for NAFTA and his voting record is identical to hers.
Obama’s NAFTA mailer “falsely claims that Hillary said NAFTA was a “boon” to the economy,” but Hillary Clinton actually never said that it was. This is not the first time Obama has used a NAFTA mailer against Clinton. In both mailers the Obama camp based their claim on a quote from a 2006 Newsday article that characterized Clinton’s views “without any substantiation.” In fact, Newsday has recently said that “the Obama campaign’s use of their article was “misleading,”" and Politico “called the Obama campaign’s use of the quote “bogus.“”
Here we see once again that contrary to his claims, Barack Obama is running a dirty campaign, which Clinton pointed out today. My saying this here will no doubt rear the hackles of Obama supporters, but so be it. Point blank in my opinion, Barack Obama is a hypocrite on NAFTA, Iraq, health care and most of all on his claims to be above the fray.
