Nudge Nudge, Wink Wink
Feb 28th, 2008 at 10:32 am by Susie
UPDATE from the Politico:
A spokesman for the Canadian Embassy to the United States, Tristan Landry, flatly denied the CTV report that a senior Obama aide had told the Canadian ambassador not to take seriously Obama’s denunciations of Nafta.
“None of the presidential campaigns have called either the Ambassador or any of the officials here to raise Nafta,” Landry said.
He said there had been no conversations at all on the subject.
“We didn’t make any calls, they didn’t call us,” Landry said.
“There is no story as far as we’re concerned,” he said.
I keep telling you, folks - it’s all show biz:
… Within the last month, a top staff member for Obama’s campaign telephoned Michael Wilson, Canada’s ambassador to the United States, and warned him that Obama would speak out against NAFTA, according to Canadian sources.
The staff member reassured Wilson that the criticisms would only be campaign rhetoric, and should not be taken at face value.
But Tuesday night in Ohio, where NAFTA is blamed for massive job losses, Obama said he would tell Canada and Mexico “that we will opt out unless we renegotiate the core labour and environmental standards.”
Late Wednesday, a spokesperson for the Obama campaign said the staff member’s warning to Wilson sounded implausible, but did not deny that contact had been made.
SusanHu at MyDD:
Imagine that YOU are one of those union members or factory workers whose jobs have gone overseas. Imagine that you’re hanging on to Barack Obama’s “rhetoric” about NAFTA. Imagine how you’ll feel when you find out that — wink, wink — it was just campaign talk.
I’d be heartbroken. I would feel utterly betrayed.
Remember the Machinists’ Union president? Do you recall his outrage at Sen. Obama’s promises — to the faces of machinists from whom he took hard-earned campaign donations — to save Maytag jobs only to find out that Obama never spoke out for those workers. And that Obama took donations from the top owners of Maytag and never once mentioned the workers’ plight to those executives.
With his recent run from the term “liberal” (yeah, the same strategy being hailed as “genius” by the acolytes over at Daily Kos), Obama’s sounding all too much like a certain famous “compassionate conservative.”
And this is why I need to cut back on blogging. Every time I read something like this, I can feel my blood pressure spiking.
(UPDATE: By the way, I don’t believe NAFTA was a total disaster. It was when BushCo stopped enforcing all the restrictions that jobs went sailing out of the country. But for Christ’s sake, don’t run as the fucking messenger of hope and then make it into a game. People might start to wonder if they’re being played.)
I took down my post from yesterday because it was a little nasty, but I’m still looking forward to the day when SusanHu posts something about Obama smoking crack and having gay sex in a limo. It makes my blood pressure rise too, but maybe not for the same reasons as you.
But won’t it be fun watching how they spin this?
Sirota says the Obama strongly repudiates the story. I’m familiar with Canadian politics to an extent, and Sirota is right when he says the government officials claiming this are members of the Conservative Party, which is the Canadian equivalent of the GOP.
What I DO know is that President Clinton is responsible for NAFTA in the first place, and Mrs. Clinton has praised NAFTA as one of his successes, and as a success for New York. Now she acts as if she never supported it to begin, which just isn’t true.
Do I trust Obama to repeal or renegotiate NAFTA? Not really, but who knows?
Do I trust Clinton to repeal what she says has been a success? No. I do not.
Could you link the post at dailykos where obama runs from the word “liberal”?
But won’t it be fun watching how they spin this?
they’re probably “spin” it the same way the clinton campaign did, by denying the phone call ever happened. from the same article susie quoted above:
i don’t know why SusanHu would ignore that part, or claim that “there’s no wink, wink in her statements”
You know, Brendan, the NAFTA stuff just isn’t that cut and dried. (I remember attending a speech on NAFTA years ago given by two prominent British political journalists, one a socialist and the other a conservative. They said the same thing.)
Neither Clinton nor Obama are being completely honest with the public, probably because it’s an emotional issue and complicated. (It would have worked better if the Bush administration hadn’t decided to stop enforcing the terms.)
And you simply have to make a distinction between what she supported as a political wife and what she says now. You don’t see a difference there? I mean, you honestly think she was going to publicly attack her husband the president on a major policy? David Gergen, who was there, said she raised her concerns about NAFTA in private meetings, but it would have been in no way appropriate for her to undercut his policy in public.
But you see, Clinton isn’t the “hope” and “change” candidate. Obama is. Every time something like this happens, he looks a little more like another politician.
You forgot this part:
The problem here is that no one has any proof of what was said to whom, and who is playing whom. Meanwhile, we have Clinton operatives saying that Hillary Clinton did not support NAFTA, yet she has spoken positively of NAFTA on several occasions, including in her autobiography, “Living History.”
Imagine how you’ll feel when you find out that — wink, wink — Hillary praised NAFTA before claiming she never really liked it. Must be all that experience that lets her turn on a dime like that…
Maybe when she said “changed…lives and…America” she meant negatively! Yeah, that must be it.
Not when she claims that period as part of her resume for being president.
what lutton says @ comment 6: “Not when she claims that period as part of her resume for being president.” from the first link he provides:
“And you simply have to make a distinction between what she supported as a political wife and what she says now. You don’t see a difference there?”
She said that as Senator for NY, not president’s wife.
I still want to see the “Obama running from liberalism” link before I comment on it.
You want to turn this into compare-and-contrast with Clinton; I don’t. Obama’s the presumptive nominee, and he’s sold himself as the candidate of change. Just sounds like business as usual to me.
You know what? I’ve never had a job where I was allowed to criticize my boss publicly. Do you think that means I didn’t learn anything?
what lutton said. if she wants to claim those eight years as experience, then she has to take the blame for all the stuff that the clinton administration did, unless she actually spoke out against it at that time.
i agree that NAFTA is a mixed issue. what i see now in ohio is two politicians pandering for votes. so what? it’s part of their job to pander and yet nothing either of them has said (that they will make sure there are enforceable labor and environmental standards) is contradicted by either of their record, so the pandering is just pandering. it’s not actual lying.
what i also see here is a clinton supporter (SusanHu) repeating another unsubstantiated rumor about obama, while ignoring that the same unsubstantiated rumor exists about her own candidate. even when the rumor about her own candidate is mentioned in the very same article she used to attack obama.
Brendan, it was up yesterday and it was all over the place. Go find it yourself, I don’t have time.
But you see, Clinton isn’t the “hope” and “change” candidate. Obama is. Every time something like this happens, he looks a little more like another politician.
He is another politician. Just because he talks about hope and change shouldn’t make anyone think differently. Changing “the old political ways” doesn’t mean there won’t be “new political ways” that are installed.
I do think people should be thinking about the “genie”. If Obama is elected on a change platform, I don’t think that goes back into the bottle. With Obama’s point being that people power can fight money power, I don’t think that those who support that belief are going to let Obama forget that if he were elected. Not that I think he would, either.
You want to turn this into compare-and-contrast with Clinton
then why link approvingly to SusanHu’s blog post? that’s exactly what it is, a compare and contrast post.
and he’s sold himself as the candidate of change.
well, he’s sold himself with lines about specific changes. he’s not, for example, for changing the country back to the gold standard. it’s not a valid argument to claim that because obama uses the word “change” in his speeches that he must automatically be for any change we can imagine.
also, clinton has also tried to sell herself as “the candidate of change”, as has mccain, and virtually every presidential candidate in my memory. “candidate of change” is one of those lines that literally everyone uses. no one ever runs on the status quo, not even incumbants.
I propose that we allow no more than 25% of our economy to be outsourced. That provides adequate competition and keeps our domestic indutries viable.
Well, as my old Irish neighbor used to say, “Shit in one hand and hope in the other, see which fills up faster.”
One reason for Reagan Democrats is that the liberals were more than willing to cut loose the poor and uneducated for cheaper goods. The not so hidden snobbery in pro-NAFTA posts tells the working class prole all they need to know. There is no place for them at the table. At least with Bushie, one is a servant.
I haven’t seen a denial yet from the Obama campaign that they phoned the Canadian ambassador on NAFTA. Only that it was implausible.
And I do think CTV is slightly more credible than Drudge, and if the Obama campaign can call for strong denials on a Drudge story, they ought to be able to strongly deny a CTV story.
Politico reports that the Canadian embassy denies the story:
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0208/Canadians_deny_Obama_call.html
Is it this one?
if so, I would have to say I agree with that. It’s called “moving the overton window”, mainstreaming our ideas just like the conservatives mainstreamed theirs.
It’s called moving the overton window right.
“It’s called moving the overton window right.”
how so?
The weird thing about the NAFTA issue is that some folks are writing about the validity of using NAFTA as a whipping boy for a bunch of labor and econmic issues:
Yglesias:
It almost seems like a Jedi mind trick to get the Clinton camp to repudiate itself: they’ve ‘gone negative’ against their own candidate, because NAFTA is now a code word for labor and economic woes. Public perception regarding NAFTA changed, and so did Hillary right along.
This is not the change you’re looking for. You can go about your business. Move along…move along.
Yet, for all this rhetoric, do either of them propose any grand fixes to NAFTA? No:
All of it is gamesmanship, pure and simple.
TPM
Games, show biz. What’s the difference?
i still want to know how obama is moving the window to the right.
Liberal = bad scary thing. Anything good cannot be liberal because duh, it’s good.
To me, the timing of this scandal makes its authenticity suspect. NAFTA’s a sensitive issue in Ohio; why would Obama go backdoor now and jeopardize his chances Tuesday?
Think of it realistically: what does he gain by sending such a message now that he couldn’t gain later, after the Ohio and Pennsylvania primaries?
It does sound like Canada’s Conservative Party members are trying to game the primary process. Divide and conquer. And though I’ve endorsed neither candidate, I just haven’t seen Obama do anything that clumsy and amateurish, nor do I see any motive for him to have done that.
“Liberal = bad scary thing. Anything good cannot be liberal because duh, it’s good.”
Is that what he said?
I don’t see that as saying “liberal=bad”. he’s saying that presenting ethics as a liberal/conservative position doesn’t make sense. And he’s right. It’s a matter then entire public no matter what their political leanings should be concerned about.
I think the diarist is right when s/he describes Obama’s rhetoric as
Is he wrong? Or should the Democratic Party only appeal to hardcore lefties, the same way the GOP seems to only want to appeal to hardcore righties?
But hey, what do I know? I’ve obviously been drinking the kool-aid, and can’t possibly think for myself.
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