It looks like Hillary has <a href="http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/02/hillary_shame_on_you_barack_ob.php">decided to go hard</a>, not go home.

Call me crazy, but I don't think Democratic voters are going to respond well to this.

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Clinton was holding two fliers as she spoke, one on universal health care, and the other on trade. Most of the tirade seems to relate to health care, but her campaign is pushing back equally hard on both issues. And I cannot for the life of me understand how Clinton thinks she will be able to get away with this on NAFTA. 
Now for the record, I realize that Obama's fliers have been tough, and there are some who have suggested that his health care fliers might cross the line, but given the historical record on NAFTA I would think she would want to leave that issue alone.

Here's a bit more background<a href="http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/23/clinton-slams-obama-tactics"> from the NYT:</a>
<blockquote>The issue of trade is particularly sensitive in Ohio, where many people believe that trade agreements like Nafta have cost the state thousands of jobs.

As president, Bill Clinton was a vigorous supporter of Nafta, lobbied Congress to pass it and signed it into law despite objections from fellow Democrats, who believed it would cost the country jobs.

Mrs. Clinton strenuously distanced herself from that position on Saturday, saying Mr. Clinton did not negotiate the agreement.

"The agreement was negotiated in the Bush administration," she said. "It was passed in the Clinton administration."</blockquote>

Clinton may not have negotiated it, but he pushed <em>very</em> hard for its passage. And although she is technically correct to point out that the agreement was negotiated by his predecessors in the Bush adminsitration, she is leaving out the fact that her husband negotiated two supplemental agreements - The North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation and North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation - designed to address flaws in the initial agreement. The final agreement still wasn't perfect, but it was good enough for Clinton to win the fight over its ratification.

Sen. Clinton makes it sound as if this was something her husband did grudgingly, and that's just demonstrably false. Here are just a few examples of President Clinton's take on NAFTA. There are quite literally hundreds more <a href="http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/">in his offical presidential papers</a> for those so inclined

From <a href="http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=46731&st=nafta&st1=">an interview with Larry King</a> in June of 1993:

<blockquote>Mr. King. During the campaign you told me, in fact, almost the day it happened, when President Bush signed it in San Antonio, you said to me the next day that you supported this fair trade concept with Mexico and Canada on balance. You had some questions. Do you still have some questions?

The President. Yes, but I'm still for it. As a matter of fact, I feel more strongly today, if possible, that it is the right direction for us to take. The trade agreement, I thought, had some weaknesses. It was negotiated with a greater concern for our financial institutions and our intellectual property concerns, that is, patent and copyright concerns, than for new jobs and environmental cleanup, things that I thought were real important.

So we're trying to fix that. We're trying to make sure that this trade agreement with Mexico and Canada has very strong provisions to guarantee appropriate investments in environmental cleanups, so we don't have more pollution in America or we don't have people going down to Mexico just so they won't have to have any antipollution expenses, and so we have some labor protections.

But I think we're getting there. And I believe that the right kind of trade agreement can create jobs in America. I don't agree that it'll cost jobs. If you look just in the last couple of days, there was a notice from General Motors that they're closing an operation in Mexico, bringing it back to the United States, going to create 1,000 jobs in Michigan and higher labor costs because of the productivity and the nearness to the labor parts market, to the auto parts market. And I think you're going to see a lot of that. If anybody wants to shut a plant down and go to Mexico just because they have cheap wages, they can do that today. Nothing is going to change in the NAFTA agreement. But if you have more growth on both sides, then you'll have less illegal immigration from Mexico, more people will be able to get jobs at home and stay with their families, their incomes will rise, and they'll buy more American products. Last month, Mexico replaced Japan as the second biggest purchaser of American manufacturing products. We have a $6 billion trade surplus with them. That means we create jobs out of our trade with them. So I think it's a good deal for America, and I hope we can pass it.</blockquote>

Got that? NAFTA will grow the economy, slow illegal immigration, bring manufacturing jobs back from overseas, and more. Does that sound like someone who is opposed to the trade deal? Does this sound like someone trying to place the credit and/or balme for the agreement on the previous adminsitration?

As I mentioned above, Clinton did have some concerns over the initial agreement, concerns that he addressed through two major supplemental agreements. Here's part of what President Clinton said on <a href="http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=47070&st=nafta&st1=">September 14th, 1993</a>, the day of their signing:

<blockquote>I tell you, my fellow Americans, that if we learned anything from the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the governments in Eastern Europe, even a totally controlled society cannot resist the winds of change that economics and technology and information flow have imposed in this world of ours. That is not an option. Our only realistic option is to embrace these changes and create the jobs of tomorrow.

I believe that NAFTA will create 200,000 American jobs in the first 2 years of its effect. I believe if you look at the trends--and President Bush and I were talking about it this morning-starting about the time be was elected President, over one-third of our economic growth and in some years over one-half of our net new jobs came directly from exports. And on average, those exports-related jobs paid much higher than jobs that had no connection to exports. I believe that NAFTA will create a million jobs in the first 5 years of its impact. And I believe that that is many more jobs than will be lost, as inevitably some will be, as always happens when you open up the mix to a new range of competition...

<b>Together, the efforts of two administrations now have created a trade agreement that moves beyond the traditional notions of free trade, seeking to ensure trade that pulls everybody up instead of dragging some down while others go up. We have put the environment at the center of this in future agreements. We have sought to avoid a debilitating contest for business where countries seek to lure them only by slashing wages or despoiling the environment.</b>

...This is also essential to our leadership in this hemisphere and the world. Having won the cold war, we face the more subtle challenge of consolidating the victory of democracy and opportunity and freedom. For decades, we have preached and preached and preached greater democracy, greater respect for human rights, and more open markets to Latin America. NAFTA finally offers them the opportunity to reap the benefits of this. Secretary Shalala represented me recently at the installation of the President of Paraguay. And she talked to Presidents from Colombia, from Chile, from Venezuela, from Uruguay, from Argentina, from Broil. They all wanted to know, "Tell me, is NAFTA going to pass so we can become part of this great new market--more, hundreds of millions more of American consumers for our products."

...it is clear that most of the people that oppose this pact are rooted in the fears and insecurities that are legitimately gripping the great American middle class. It is no use to deny that these fears and insecurities exist. It is no use denying that many of our people have lost in the battle for change. But it is a great mistake to think that NAFTA will make it worse. Every single solitary thing you hear people talk about, that they're worried about, can happen whether this trade agreement passes or not, and most of them will be made worse if it fails. And I can tell you it will be better if it passes.</blockquote>

Fast forward a few years later to <a href="http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=51678&st=nafta&st1=benefit">an interview with Tom Brokaw</a>. By January of 1995, Clinton was framing the fight like this:

<blockquote>We took on the NAFTA fight. It was deader than a doornail when I became President, and we brought it back to life.</blockquote>

And yet Sen. Clinton would today like us to believe that this wasn't her husband's doing.

Last but not least, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1997/05/07/fdch/clinton/">from a speech in May of 1997</a>:

<blockquote>Four years ago, together, we led the fight for NAFTA. Many people in both our countries painted a dark picture of lost jobs and boarded up factories should NAFTA prevail.

Well, they were wrong. NAFTA is working, working for you and working for the American people. In three short years and despite Mexico's worst recession in this century, trade between our nations has grown nearly 60 percent, as President Zedillo said.

Mexico is our third largest trading partner, just behind Japan, which has an economy 15 times larger.

Our exports to Mexico are 37 percent higher than before NAFTA, an all-time high in spite of the economic difficulties here. But for Mexico, NAFTA's benefits are just as great. </blockquote>

The historical record here couldn't possibly be more clear. Bill Clinton didn't just support NAFTA, he enthusiastically supported it, taking full credit years later for both its passage and its benefits. The original agreement may not have been perfect, but thanks to his efforts it wasn't just the original agreement that was passed. He made it his own by fighting for two important supplemental agreements, additions without which NAFTA may not have passed. So this nonsense about the agreement being negotiated by the Bush administration is just that: nonsense.

Now of course Hillary Clinton is not Bill Clinton, and she very well may have had a different take on NAFTA at the time. But did she ever express that while her husband was in office? Not that anyone is aware. Did she work behind the scenes to change her husband's policies? Not that we know of. And once she reached the Senate, did she fight to roll back the parts of NAFTA that had previously concerned her? Again, not that anyone knows.

This matters, of course, because she has frequently tried to make her husband's accomplishments her own. Her "35 years of experience" mantra only makes sense if you include all of the years spent in the White House as First Lady. She can't have it both ways. Either her husband's administration's accomplishments are her own or they are not. If there are parts of his record that she has problems with, she should make that clear. And more importantly - much more importantly - she should document what she has done during her time in the Senate to undo what he had done.

Obama has already started to <a href="http://hotlineblog.nationaljournal.com/archives/2008/02/puzzled.html">push back,</a> but I suspect we'll be hearing much more about this during the upcoming debate.
Cross-posted from <a href="http://blog.alexwhalen.com/">AlexWhalen.com</a>