Nafta? What's Nafta?

by Josh Gerstein
Tue, 26 Aug 2008 at 11:58 PM

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Is Senator Obama's campaign making a deliberate effort to tone down Democrats' public pillorying of free trade agreements like Nafta?

It certainly seemed that way tonight at the Democratic National Convention here in Denver. Labor leaders, workers, and politicians who addressed the delegates railed against President Bush, Senator McCain, tax giveaways, and other villains, but said virtually nothing about the trade agreements which were discussed ad nauseum during the Democratic primary fight earlier this year.
In their remarks, the president of the AFL-CIO, John Sweeney, and Senator Stabenow of Michigan, whose state has been driven into a long, localized recession by manufacturing job losses, made no direct reference to the North American Free Trade Agreement or any other trade pact.
Ms. Stabenow said Mr. Obama was convinced American workers could "win if the rules are fair," but she put the emphasis on the potential benefits of trade and not the purported dangers. "He wants to export our products, not our jobs," she said.
A Michigan auto parts factory worker who spoke to the convention, Robin Golden, complained that he will be unemployed in two weeks. "My job is being shipped to Mexico," he said. He blamed "tax breaks for companies that outsource jobs," but he said not a word about trade agreements or the bogeyman of the primary, Nafta.
Governor Strickland of Ohio did refer in passing to "stuck-in-the-past trade deals," but did not dwell on the issue.
The softpedaling of criticism of the trade deals was notable since just a few months ago Mr. Obama and Senator Clinton seemed to be trying to one-up each other in their denunciations of Nafta and other trade pacts.
In an interview in June with Fortune magazine, Mr. Obama said some of the rhetoric he and other candidates used on trade during the Democratic primary was "overheated."
That comment fueled long-standing suspicions among some labor leaders that the senator from Illinois might turn out to be a free trader if and when he gets to the White House. The absence of talk about the issue tonight might underscore those concerns.

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