Hillary Clinton: Up to Her Eyeballs in NAFTAgate

The Clinton campaign’s exploitation of Barack Obama's ill-timed NAFTA flap, in which one of his top economic advisers, University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee, assured Canadian officials that the candidates' anti-NAFTA ranting was just "political maneuvering," proved decisive on Tuesday.

This isn’t the last you’ll hear of this story, and when you do, it may be Clinton who’s doing the back-peddling.

Free trade is a bogeyman to working-class Democrats, and NAFTA serves as an all-purpose, totemic stand-in for their economic insecurities. It's no surprise, therefore, that "NAFTAgate" (as the Clintonites dubbed it) was devastating to Obama, making the probable difference between winning and losing Texas and costing him a much smaller margin of defeat in Ohio. In each state, the white working class, among whom Obama had begun to approach parity through his string of February victories, went overwhelmingly back to Clinton. That the Obama campaign had spent days denying a true story didn’t help matters.

The story is far from over, and two new salient facts have emerged in reporting by the Toronto newspaper the Globe and Mail: (1) The whole thing appears to be some kind of Canadian ratfuck, though exactly what a political hack on the prime minister's staff was hoping to achieve with a political dirty trick is unclear; (2) The Clinton campaign played precisely the same game of wink and nod on free trade for which they sanctimoniously denounced Obama.

The leaker in NAFTAgate was Ian Brodie, chief of staff to Conservative prime minister Steven Harper. Brodie is exclusively a political official. He has nothing whatsoever to do with trade policy, so whatever his motivation in gossiping about contacts with US presidential candidates might have been, it was not the welfare of the Canadian economy. What's more, in Brodie's original story, it was the Clinton campaign that approached Canadian officials to assure them that their candidate was not about to withdraw from the trade agreement, regardless of what she said on the stump. Several rounds of telephone later, and Canadian television stations were reporting on Obama campaign double-talk.

That Howard Wolfson and the rest of the gang would raise Obama's supposed promiscuity on trade issues in full knowledge of the fact that their campaign had been every bit as duplicitous is just about on par with the classlessness with which they conduct themselves generally. The true nature of this strange episode is bouncing around the blogosphere, but has yet to cross over into the mainstream media. Because, as you know, the press is so heavily slanted against Hillary Clinton.

There is a theme song for the occasion: