The "Renegotiate NAFTA" Hoax

Both Democratic Presidential candidates are digging themselves a deep hole as they pander to Ohio primary voters by insisting they'll "renegotiate NAFTA" when elected President. They have no intention of doing so, and one of Barack Obama's campaign lieutenants said as much, in winking code words, to Canadian trade officials who warned against backing out of the trade agreements after hearing Clinton and Obama's speeches in Ohio. Making matters worse, Obama and Clinton are shuttling between Ohio and the pro-trade state of Texas due to the primary schedule, and parsing their words very calculatedly while addressing the crowds of southern Texas who largely like NAFTA.

The bottom line is that it'd be virtually impossible to "renegotiate" NAFTA at this stage. The wheels of the agreement are in steady motion and have been for more than a decade, and the backlash consequences of withdrawing now would be far more severe than the downsides of NAFTA. The time to "renegotiate" NAFTA to appease the interests of working people at home was back in 1993....but Hillary Clinton and her husband were too busy offering the moon and the stars to skeptical Democratic Congressmen to sign the accord back in 1993. When Bill Clinton signed the trade treaty into law, any hope of improving the deal for American workers were dashed with the stroke of the pen.

Besides that, NAFTA is merely a symbollic fall guy for the trade wars, and an increasingly insignificant one. America is no longer losing its manufacturing jobs to Mexico, it's losing them to China and elsewhere in Asia. Even if NAFTA was renegotiated, the outflux of American jobs to the Third World would not be slowed. Mexico was merely a speedbump on the race to the bottom, and corporations have long ago discovered a much more abundant selection of warm bodies willing to make the goods that fill the shelves of Wal-Mart for even less money than Mexican laborers were back in 1994. Pretending that a renegotiation of NAFTA would improve the state of affairs in Ohio's abandoned factories makes both Hillary and Obama look like snake oil peddlers.....making them cinches for attacks from Republicans in the general election.

Furthermore, what possible long-term benefit can Clinton or Obama get from saying they plan to renegotiate NAFTA if they have no intention of doing so? Does making a promise during the campaign that they know they won't be able to keep serve the rest of the party well heading into election cycles beyond 2008? Bill Clinton made a similar promise during the 1992 campaign, when he had the whip hand to renegotiate NAFTA BEFORE it was enacted, but refused to even keep that promise, to the detriment of the Democratic Party in the 1994 midterms.

That should be the lesson for Obama and Hillary during this campaign. They should keep the promise Bill failed to, and fight tooth and nail to produce a better deal for American workers in coming trade agreements. And when voters in places like Ohio bemoan the side effects of trade deals with the code word "NAFTA", make the easy case that our erosion of manufacturing jobs has little to do with NAFTA in the year 2008. The target has long ago moved across the Pacific Ocean. And lastly, continue to press the need to fix our health care system. Canada has higher labor costs but is still picking off our manufacturing jobs because the cost of financing individualized health care policies for American workers is even more cost-prohibitive than higher Canadian wages. Disingenuously vowing to undo NAFTA simply sets these same Ohio voters up to hand the Democratic Party a spankin' in 2010 every bit as ferocious as the one they got in 1994 when they last betrayed workers.