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Obama on defense over Canada memo on NAFTA |
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By Sam Youngman
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Posted: 03/03/08 02:24 PM [ET] |
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Sen. Barack Obama's (D-Ill.) campaign on Monday defended a top campaign adviser’s meeting with Canadian government officials that has raised questions over whether Obama’s rhetoric against the North American Free Agreement would be fulfilled in office.
David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, said Austin Goolsbee was not acting in his role as senior adviser to the campaign when he spoke with Canadian officials about Obama's position on the trade agreement. Obama and rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) have both publicly said they would seek to change NAFTA if elected president.
According to a memo written by a Canadian official and circulating in the Canadian government, however, Goolsbee told Canadian officials they should consider Obama's threat to be "political positioning." The Associated Press obtained and reported on the memo, which was written by a Canadian official.
Initially the Obama campaign and Goolsbee denied such a meeting or conversation had ever taken place. Plouffe on Sunday said Goolsbee was not part of a formal meeting and was only speaking informally as a University of Chicago professor and not Obama's senior economic adviser.
NAFTA has become a huge issue in the Obama-Clinton battle ahead of Tuesday's critical primary in Ohio, where many blame a decline in manufacturing on NAFTA and other trade agreements.
Clinton's campaign has pushed the issue to the forefront, claiming that the Obama camp's early denials that a meeting had even taken place call Obama's position into question.
"Are these denials, half-denials, quarter-denials no longer operative?" Howard Wolfson, a Clinton spokesman, said on a separate call Monday.
Plouffe repeatedly said Monday that Obama has said publicly and privately that NAFTA needs to be renegotiated, adding that the Clinton campaign was blowing the meeting and memo out of proportion out of desperation ahead of Ohio's contest.
“Sen. Clinton knows full well that she's not telling the truth on this story, and that her blatant distortion is just part of her campaign's stated strategy to throw the kitchen sink at Sen. Obama in the closing days of this campaign," Bill Burton, an Obama spokesman, said in a statement. "The truth is, Sen. Clinton called NAFTA a victory and has switched positions for raw political reasons. Her false attack won't protect American workers, but as president, Sen. Obama will."
Clinton has said Obama needs to explain the matter, and her chief surrogate in Ohio, Gov. Ted Strickland, said Monday that Obama needs to make clear where he stands.
"It’s important that the people of Ohio understand that it has recently come to light that Sen. Clinton’s opponent has a chief economic adviser that is reported to have talked with the leadership, the governmental leadership in Canada indicating to him that her opponent’s not terribly serious about what he’s saying in Ohio about NAFTA but this is just political rhetoric," Strickland said in a statement. "Well, we people in Ohio believe that you ought to say what you mean and you ought to mean what you say." |
