NAFTA Again? Goolsbee Again? Is Obama Smokin’ Again (or all along)?

Susan’s Update: ABC News’s Jake Tapper, in today’s post, “Obama is Smokin’” — uh huh, there are suspicions — concludes with this:

I don’t like feeling that I wasn’t being dealt with honestly [about if he's smoking or not]. …

This isn’t the only time I’ve felt that way about the Obama campaign, of course — its response to the Austan Goolsbee controversy was a profile in dissembling. (Not that Sens. Hillary Clinton and John McCain or their campaigns are entirely innocent in this area either. Or even that Obama is necessarily the worst offender.)

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Now, the floor is PsychoDrew’s: Amid more false attacks from the Obama campaign on NAFTA, the Clinton campaign called on Senator Obama to allow the campaign official privately directing Obama’s NAFTA policy take a more public role:

“The Obama campaign ought to have Austan Goolsbee on their call today [April 2],” Clinton Campaign Spokesperson Jay Carson said. “While Senator Obama was telling voters he would fix NAFTA, his chief economics advisor was telling Canadians that his position was just words. Instead of making false attacks on Hillary Clinton’s character, the Obama campaign should finally explain why it continues to mislead voters about Mr. Goolsbee’s meeting with the Canadian government.” [No reports indicate that Mr. Goolsbee joined in on the call.]

The audacity of hype is hitting a fever pitch in the Obama camp with another Obama surrogate accusing Hillary Clinton of re-writing history.

“I find it disturbing (she) would rewrite history at this point,” said California Rep. George Miller, an Obama supporter who voted in Congress against NAFTA in 1993.

If she was such a strong opponent of it, and spoke out so often about it, why did she never speak to those of us who were principals in that ._._. I don’t know who these audiences are that she refers to, but they weren’t members of Congress.

A careful analysis of the public record does not indicate that, as First Lady, Hillary Clinton ever gave a public speech denouncing NAFTA and calling on her husband to scrap the plan or even held meetings to mobilize forces to bring the trade pact down. Would such an action have prevented NAFTA from being passed by Congress? Perhaps. But it also would have created an image of a dysfunctional White House, providing further ammunition to the GOP in the 1994 midterm elections and the 1996 general election.
Can you imagine the America we’d have if Bob Dole had been elected in 1996?

There never would have been a surplus for George Bush to squander. Kosovo would not have declared independence last month, because Bob Dole would have sat on his hands and watched as Serbian forces carried out a genocide on the Kosovar Albanians.

What is really maddening about Obama’s attack is that he has asked us to accept a similar explanation for his own seemingly contradictory behavior. How many times have we heard about this famous speech in 2002 opposing the war? And we have all read his comments to the NY Times at the Democratic National Convention in 2004:

”But, I’m not privy to Senate intelligence reports,” Mr. Obama said. ”What would I have done? I don’t know. What I know is that from my vantage point the case was not made.”

But have you ever heard his explanation for this contradiction? When CNN’s Candy Crowley asked Obama about why he wavered in his opposition to the resolution in that interview, he said that it would not have been appropriate to criticize the Democratic nominees on the eve of the convention:

“The only time when I said I’m not sure what I would do if I were in the Senate was right before the Democratic convention, when we had two nominees that obviously I did not want to be criticizing right before they got up and received the nomination,” he said.

“But you didn’t mean it?” Crowley asked.

“So — well, no. What I’m suggesting is, everybody had difficult choices to make. And I — and these were difficult choices. I made the right choice.” Obama replied.

So the right choice was to shut up and stand behind the leaders of the party? And now he criticizes Hillary Clinton for having done the same thing when her husband was president!? Why is he peddling such a blatantly hypocritical attack right now? Well, the Leader-Post has a theory:

Aiming to undo political damage the Illinois senator himself has suffered because of the “NAFTA-gate” controversy with Canada, Obama’s campaign said Clinton’s White House records “completely contradict” the New York senator’s assertions she was a frequent and forceful critic of the deal her husband signed with the Canadian and Mexican governments.

But Obama lost Ohio’s Democratic primary on March 4 to Clinton after reports his senior economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, told Canada’s consul general in Chicago that the Illinois senator’s tough talk on NAFTA was just campaign rhetoric. The controversy is thought to have contributed to Obama’s loss in Ohio, and Clinton has used it to hammer Obama among voters in Pennsylvania.

While Senator Obama avoids giving “straight answers to tough questions” by making false attacks against Senator Clinton, the one million workers who lost their jobs because of NAFTA are waiting for Senator Obama to decide which of the five explanations he’s provided for Goolsbee’s meeting with Canadian officials is true:

5. 3/10/08 - Sen. Obama: The meeting did happen, they did discuss NAFTA, but advisor just said Obama wanted to make NAFTA ’stronger for U.S. workers.’ “So here’s what happens. You’ve got one of my economic advisors goes and visits a Canadian embassy and they’re asking him questions and he says, ‘Well, Senator Obama isn’t planning to repeal NAFTA, but he wants to amend it to make it stronger for U.S. workers.’ The Canadian embassy writes it up as, ‘Well, maybe Obama is not as tough on NAFTA as you might think.’ And the Clintons start waving this and saying, ‘See? Actually, he’s the one.’” [Mississippi Rally, 3/10/08]

4. 2/29/08: Sen. Obama: ‘It did not happen.’ Anchor: “So, completely inaccurate, did not happen, end of discussion.” Sen. Obama: “It did not happen.” [WKYC TV, 2/29/08]

3. 2/28/08 - Rice: ‘There had been no contact.’ “The Canadian ambassador issued a statement that was absolutely false. There had been no contact. There had been no discussions on NAFTA. So we take the Canadians at their word…period.” [MSNBC, Susan Rice, 2/28/08]

2. 2/27/08 - Obama advisor just said ‘hello.’ “Goolsbee: Canada’s consul general in Chicago contacted him ‘at one point to say ‘hello’ because their office is around the corner.” [ABC, 2/29/08]

1. 2/27/08 - ‘No conversations have taken place’ with the Canadian government on NAFTA. “Earlier Thursday, the Obama campaign insisted that no conversations have taken place with any of its senior ranks and representatives of the Canadian government on the NAFTA issue.” [CTV, 2/29/08]

Oh, the audacity!