Obama speaks with forked tongue on NAFTA

Byron York:

For the last several months, the tone of the Democratic presidential debate on the issue of trade has worried government officials in Canada and Mexico. Would a President Barack Obama or a President Hillary Clinton actually pull the U.S. out of the North American Free Trade Agreement? It’s a nightmare scenario in Ottawa and Mexico City — not to mention Washington — and Canadian and Mexican officials have tried as best they can to gauge just how sincere the criticisms of NAFTA coming from Obama and Clinton really are.

Those criticisms have been particularly intense in the run-up to today’s primary in economically struggling Ohio. At last week’s 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 Canada’s CTV television network reported that, in early February, a representative of the Obama campaign assured Canadian officials that they need not take Obama’s 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 Obama’s criticism of NAFTA was not sincere?” top Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson asked. “It’s a simple question.”

But it wasn’t 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.

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York goes on to describe the memo which does not support the Obama narrative. I suspect that Goosbee will be thrown under the campaign bus by the Obama team. Obama was already looking ridiculous for his arguments against NAFTA. Now it appears they were either insincere or he really is that naive about the trade issue. Neither case is flattering to his campaign outside the fever swamps of union activist who are looking to blame someone else for the mess they have made in the rust belt.