Wow, this is horrible news for Obama. He is busted for pandering to the Midwest audience. If he had any sense of economics, he'd know that we need strong, stable economies as trading partners. A strong Canada and a strong Mexico are vital for a strong United States. It also helps border security indirectly by lessening the motivation to leave Mexico. The benefits of free trade are simply undeniable. Obama's plan to rip apart NAFTA is a slap in the face to Mexican-Americans in Texas, as well as the voters in the Midwest who were lied to. This just goes to show that Obama will say anything to get elected. The 'fairy tale' candidate continues to be EXPOSED. Canadian diplomatic memo disproves Obama campaign claims Thomas Lifson The man who tantalizes the unhappy voter with promises of change may be discovering that this diplomacy stuff is a little more difficult than it looked. After threatening the NAFTA treaty while pandering to Ohio voters facing declining manufacturing employment, the Obama camp was blindsided by a report from the Canadian television network CTV that his campaign had privately reassured Canadian officials previously that he wouldn't really change NAFTA, no matter what was said on the campaign trail, that it would just be a Northern version what the late Senator Patrick Moynihan called "Boob bait for the bubbas." The Obama campaign denied such a meeting: The Obama campaign told CTV late Thursday night that no message was passed to the Canadian government that suggests that Obama does not mean what he says about opting out of NAFTA if it is not renegotiated. Oh-oh! It turns out that diplomats often write up memoranda when they meet with people like campaign advisors to a leading presidential candidate in the United States. Who knew? Not the Obama campaign, apparently. So now that such a memo has turned up, widely circulated among the Canadian diplomatic corps, Team Obama is saying that those stupid Canadians weren't able to understand that their advisor really meant. Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press reports: Barack Obama's senior economic policy adviser said Sunday that Canadian government officials wrote an inaccurate portrayal of his private discussion on the campaign's trade policy in a memo obtained by The Associated Press. The memo is the first documentation to emerge publicly out of the meeting between the adviser, Austan Goolsbee, and officials with the Canadian consulate in Chicago, but Goolsbee said it misinterprets what he told them. The memo was written by Joseph DeMora, who works for the consulate and attended the meeting. Goolsbee disputed a section that read: "Noting anxiety among many U.S. domestic audiences about the U.S. economic outlook, Goolsbee candidly acknowledged the protectionist sentiment that has emerged, particularly in the Midwest, during the primary campaign. He cautioned that this messaging should not be taken out of context and should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans." "This thing about `it's more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans,' that's this guy's language," Goolsbee said of DeMora. "He's not quoting me. "I certainly did not use that phrase in any way," Goolsbee said. So, if we believe this version of the Obama campaign's story, then we have an important Obama advisor creating a seriously false impression in the diplomatic corps of our largest trading partner. Telling them that they didn't understand is not an excuse. Diplomats are supposed to be in control of their message. It is scarcely credible that Canadian diplomats are intentionally misquoting or misinterpreting Goolsbee as a means of sabotaging Obama (interfering in internal political affairs, as diplomats phrase it). The memorandum was prepared well before Obama spoke out against NAFTA in Ohio. So we are left with the conclusion that Team Obama is simply clumsy, and that's the charitable interpretation. Is making American diplomats inept the kind of change we want? Is that the hope Obama is selling? Let's face facts: if Team Obama is capable of screwing up relations with the country most similar to us, the country that knows us best, and that has the biggest stake in the health of our economy and continuing American good will, imagine what kind of havoc would be created when dealing with the likes of the Russians, the Chinese, the Syrians, or the Palestinians. Update -- Michael Dobbs writes at The Fact Checker: (hat tip: Instapundit) The bottom line is that it has taken four days to drag something approaching the full story out of the Canadian embassy and the Obama campaign. As I suggested before, both Obama and Clinton have exaggerated their opposition to NAFTA in order to win votes in economically depressed Ohio. This is a case where the technical parsing of the truth by the Obama campaign falls well short of the whole truth. http://www.americanthinker.com/prin...g/2008/03/canadian_diplomatic_memo_dispr.html
I'm not saying I necessarily believe this; however, the Canadian embassy's denial means very little to me. If he were hypothetically lying about NAFTA, it would be to the benefit of Canada, and they wouldn't want to make a statement/confirmation that would hurt his candidacy.
You sure? This is his official policy on NAFTA: Amend the North American Free Trade Agreement: Obama believes that NAFTA and its potential were oversold to the American people. Obama will work with the leaders of Canada and Mexico to fix NAFTA so that it works for American workers.
right!? It's amusing though that the crazies are losing their minds because they can't find anything to, as wnes would say, "nail him with."
Are you referring the Clintons as the crazies? It seems they are the ones that have been leaking the story out to the media.
and the canadians and mexicans are down with this? interesting that Obama seems to have been caught off guard on this issue- one wonders how he will deal with a government that is a tad less friendly than that in ottawa?
Summary http://www.newsweek.com/id/118171 Clinton's spokesman says a newly surfaced memo proves that Obama's campaign issued false denials about sending a private message to Canadian officials to disregard his criticisms of NAFTA. The Obama camp says it's all a misunderstanding, and the Canadian embassy in Washington says it regrets the whole thing. Is this "NAFTA-gate" as the Clinton campaign would like Ohio voters to believe when they vote in the March 4 primary? Or is it, as the Obama camp describes it, just a botched description by a low-level official in Canada's Chicago office of a meeting with a senior Obama adviser? It's now clear that a Canadian news report that started this flap wasn't accurate. No evidence has surfaced to show that any Obama "staffer" telephoned the Canadian ambassador in Washington, and all concerned deny that any such conversation took place. But it is equally clear that Obama's senior economic adviser did visit Canada's consulate in Chicago on Feb. 8, and that NAFTA was one of the several topics discussed.
Given that NAFTA gives each of the countries the option to opt out, I'm not sure your point. Unless you believe the US should just do what other countries want? Did you have a problem invading Iraq, even though Saudi Arabia and Turkey weren't down with it? How was he caught offguard? He's the one that brought up the whole idea of renegotiating in the debates.
