Obama NAFTA Flap

This Canadian TV News account of the Obama NAFTA flap is superior to all the other reporting I heard on the subject recently.

You might have noticed on the board today a section for campaign myths. I was going to pick out one poor spin job / inconsistency from each candidate to highlight, NAFTA for the Democrats (both) and the Hagee endorsement for McCain. Even before the leaked Canadian memo, Obama's populist trade theme struck me as uncharacteristically bad on policy merits, and I doubted that either Obama or Clinton would really strong-arm Canada like they said they would in the Ohio debate. That doesn't mean there is no room for some negotiated modifications, but I'm sure they'd be modest as Canada and the US are such large trading partners that we are interdependent and gumming up the works on the Rust Belt's behalf is just not in our national interest.

Then again, Bush put tariffs on steel during his first term to help with OH voters in 2004, and took the tariffs off after re-election. "It Don't Mean a Thing if it Ain't Got That Swing (State)."

Anyway, the above clip shows that what appeared in the hothouse of a campaign to be a whiny "BLAME CAN-A-DA!" response from Obama was actually pretty justified. The Canadians called his people weeks ago and leaked their internal analysis after the Debate last week. It was sort of petty on their part IMO. Nonetheless, this was the Obama campaign's worst couple of days in 2008, as they fumbled their parry of this mostly bogus charge on top of the already-blatant pandering about the issue.