Obama, Clinton NAFTA debate heats up

COMBINED DISPATCHES

Sunday found Barack Obama campaigning in Lorain, Ohio; former President Clinton at the Bowling Green, Ohio, community center; and Hillary Rodham Clinton in Providence, R.I.

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 Hillary 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.

Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland (D), a Clinton backer, told Bloomberg News this weekend that former President Clinton personally told him that Hillary Clinton had actually been opposed to NAFTA in 1993.

Later, at a rally in Toledo, Obama rebutted the former first lady’s statement that her husband had merely inherited NAFTA when he won the White House from former President George H.W. Bush.

President Clinton “championed NAFTA,” passed it through Congress and signed it into law, Obama said.

A spokesman for Hillary 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.

The trade agreement has long been unpopular in the industrial Midwest, where critics blame it for lost jobs and shuttered factories, many of which once employed union workers who tend to vote Democratic.

Ohio and Texas both hold primaries next week, with 334 delegates combined, and former President Clinton has said publicly his wife probably needs to win both of them if she is to win the Democratic presidential nomination.

Vermont and Rhode Island also hold primaries March 4, but have far fewer delegates and have not attracted nearly as much attention.

In an appearance in Rhode Island on Sunday afternoon, she also mocked Obama’s hopeful rhetoric, declaring that it isn’t the answer to fighting entrenched interests.

“I could stand up here and say, ‘Let’s just get everybody together, let’s get unified, the sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect,’” she said, to cheers and laughter. “You are not going to wave a magic wand and have the special interests disappear.”

Eager to recapture the white, working-class voters who favored her in some of the early primaries but have shifted to Obama over the past few weeks, Clinton traded her usual wonky style this weekend for a fiery, populist tone in speeches in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island.

Instead of giving precise policy details, she repeatedly pointed her finger in the air, declared that Americans “got shafted under President Bush” and cast herself as a fighter, as Edwards often described himself, promising to help most Americans, not just the “wealthy and the connected.”

On Saturday, Clinton charged Obama with sending out a mailer that unfairly quoted her as saying that NAFTA had been a “boon” for America, a word that Obama acknowledged she had in fact not used. But Obama kept up this line of attack on Sunday in speaking to dozens of workers at a gypsum manufacturer in Lorain.

In Bowling Green, Ohio, former President Clinton said his win in the 1992 Ohio Democratic primary gave him the nomination, and now he believes the state’s voters could turn around his wife’s campaign.

He told several hundred people at a community center that going into Ohio’s primary in June 1992, he still didn’t have enough delegates to win the party’s nomination — a comparison meant to suggest that a win for Hillary Clinton in Ohio this year could set her on the road to the nomination.

“I lost the same states in February that she lost,” he said.

Clinton listed all of the nomination contests won by his wife, and he scolded political pundits who he said have been dancing on her political grave.

“They took bets on how bad she’d lose in New Hampshire, and she won,” he said. “Its really down to Ohio and Texas.”