"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis
Wednesday, October 05, 2016
U.S. Can Unilaterally Withdraw from TPP and NAFTA Whenever the President Chooses
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Senator Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2008 promising to use the threat of presidential unilateral withdrawal to force renegotiation of NAFTA
by Gaius Publius
I mentioned something in passing, on the way to make another point in this piece, that deserves to be a point on its own. Neither NAFTA nor TPP are "set in stone." Each so-called "treaty" (in fact, these are executive or congressional-executive agreements) has a Withdrawal clause that allows for any signing nation to unilaterally exit the agreement at any time.
And if I hear Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama correctly in the clip above, the president has that unilateral authority. Neither talks about "going to Congress to get authorization." Clinton would certainly know, as would Al Gore, who was quoted by the moderator, since NAFTA was signed by Bill Clinton with Gore at his side as vice-president.
Article 2205: Withdrawal
A Party may withdraw from this Agreement six months after it provides written notice of withdrawal to the other Parties. If a Party withdraws, the Agreement shall remain in force for the remaining Parties.
Article 30.6: Withdrawal
1. Any Party may withdraw from this Agreement by providing written notice of withdrawal to the Depositary. A withdrawing Party shall simultaneously notify the other Parties of its withdrawal through the overall contact points designated under Article 27.5 (Contact Points).
2. A withdrawal shall take effect six months after a Party provides written notice to the Depositary under paragraph 1, unless the Parties agree on a different period. If a Party withdraws, this Agreement shall remain in force for the remaining Parties.
This means that even if President Obama gets Congress to pass TPP and then signs it, the next president, whoever she or he is, can unilaterally exit each agreement.
Just because these deals are signed, doesn't mean they can't be unsigned at any moment. Something to keep in mind, both during the lame duck session and during the next administration. After all, both major-party candidates now say they oppose TPP.
Put Them on Record About the Withdrawal Clause
The time to put each candidate on the record with respect to the Withdrawal clause is now, since now, before they have your vote, is when they are most inclined to say yes. If you wait until after the election, good luck.
Or, to put it more generally, Gaius' Rule of Acquisition #47 states: The best time to trade with someone is before they have what they want from you, not after. That's also my Theory of Change (number 47).
Yesterday's trip to Washington was a resounding success -- and never mind that the famous 3am train out of NYC's Penn Station left more than half an hour late, and chugged into D.C.'s Union Station a full hour and half late. "Mechanical problems" is all we were told the first time as well as the two subsequent times that the Train That Didn't Seem Like It Could went into hibernation. What me worry? After all, I had a three-hour cushion built into my schedule, even if in truth I never really imagined having half of it eaten up.
On the plus side, however, the thunderstorms that the forecasters had insisted were planned for the area were apparently called off, if not the 90-plus temps under those unexpectedly beautiful blue skies. Not a drop of rain was encountered until, on the cheap-bus trip back (at something like a third of the advance-purchase senior fare for the train trip down) at about the latitude of the Lincoln Tunnel we drove into a deluge.
There's so much I'd love to talk about, but I don't want to try readers' patience, so before saying a few words, let me just note in connection with today's Sunday Doonesbury strip that, as I've pointed out repeatedly, multiple positions on every imaginable issue aren't a Trump invention. Taking on every imaginable position, including some of the candidate's own invention, on every imaginable issue was a hallmark of the 2008 campaign of Young Johnny McCranky. To give The Donald credit, though, he's orders of magnitude more flagrant, truculent, and unapologetic about it. As he is, come to think of it, about pretty much everything.
Now to return to yesterday morning, let me just say that with so much time to fill than I'd planned for before Francis Morrone's "Monumental Washington in the 1930s and 1940s")walking tour for the National Civic Art Society, the reason for the trip, which turned out to be one of the best I've done with Francis, which is saying a lot -- my goodness, the seemingly effortless command of so many different kinds of riveting material! Anyway, the trip was indeed accomplished in under 22 hours door to door (heading out at 1:25am and trudging back in about 11:15pm).
It's like you need binoculars -- to see from one end of the Russell Senate Office Building to the other. And it's not as if the subsequently added Dirksen and Hart Senate Office Buildings are exactly petite. (Click to enlarge.)
With so much less time than I'd imagined for pre-tour wandering, I just headed south from Union Station, after taking in its brackets to the west (the handsome old post office that now serves as the National Postal Museum) and east (the vaguely modern Federal Judiciary Center named for one of my heroes, the late Justice Thurgood Marshall). Meaning that I got to see, up close and personal, such sights as the cluster of Senate office buildings, starting -- in my ass-backwards route -- with Hart and only later, after strolling around the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress (not just the original, resplendent Jefferson building but the across-the-streets Adams and Madison), catching up with Dirksen and (gasp!) the palatial Russell (opened in 1909 and named for slimy Georgia Sen. Richard Russell in 1972). You almost need binoculars to see from one end of it to the other. Yikes!
Even though I've ridden past a lot of official D.C. buildings, I was still taken back -- taking them in at leisure on foot -- by the sheer scale of them. No wonder people who find their way to Washington with some kind of official title go kind of nuts! Of course, as Francis Morrone would point out later on our tour of the museums built in the '30s and '40s along the Constitution Avenue side of the Mall as well as the vast complex of government buildings that began taking shape at the same time in what became known as the Federal Triangle, across Constitution Avenue, that since buildings in Washington couldn't be built tall, in order to provide any decent amount of working space you had to build big, footprint-wise.
Still, I wasn't prepared for the megatastic size of the Supreme Court digs. I was thinking, you know, so you need nine suites, each containing a decent enough office for the boss, plus room for desks and files for the clerks. In actuality, though, it looks like you could provide office space for all the judges in the Americas and still have room for amenities like a video viewing space and maybe a nice rec room with Ping-Pong tables.
Can Justice Clarence come out and play?You can't begin to imagine from this view -- from all the way up top of the Capitol dome -- just how ginormous the Supreme Court building is. (If it helps, you can click on the picture to enlarge it a bit.)
While I was outside the Supreme Court palace, once I found the entrance (imagine my surprise to discover that the grandiloquent side I encountered first on my backwards route, facing 2nd Street N.E., is the back!), I had to fight the urge to shout out something like "Can Justice Clarence come out and play?" Yes, I know that on a Saturday morning in July you wouldn't expect to find a Supreme Court justice at the office, but I was thinking that Justice Clarence can never get too early a start preparing all those questions he'll be asking in next term's oral arguments.
In 2016’s race to the bottom, Donald Trump is going to find out if you can become president when two-thirds of Americans don’t like you — and a majority can’t stand you. [...]
Trump is setting modern records for political toxicity — at least for a major-party candidate this far out from an election. Seventy percent of Americans surveyed in an ABC News/Washington Post poll out this week had an unfavorable opinion of Trump, up 10 points over the past month. The poll showed Trump’s favorable rating cratering at 29 percent, down from 37 percent last month.
I think it's worth backing up to the beginning of this Gene Robinson column:
Donald Trump must be the biggest liar in the history of American politics, and that’s saying something.
Trump lies the way other people breathe. We’re used to politicians who stretch the truth, who waffle or dissemble, who emphasize some facts while omitting others. But I can’t think of any other political figure who so brazenly tells lie after lie, spraying audiences with such a fusillade of untruths that it is almost impossible to keep track. Perhaps he hopes the media and the nation will become numb to his constant lying. We must not.
One reservation: I have to quibble with the notion that The Donald is unique in modern political discourse. Oh, I don't dispupte that his habit of lying is more brazen, more unashamed, and just plain wackier than what we've become used to from the Right, but not more unbroken. As I've been screaming for going on a decade now, the Right has somehow taken unto itself the Right to Lie without reservation or apology, presumably under the justification of access to a Higher Truth. And for me the tipping-point event was the 2008 presidential campaign of Arizona Sen. Young Johnny McCranky, in which the candidate never, to my hearing, uttered a word of truth, and better still, in his attempt to pander to assorted constituencies, staked out multiple positions (two, three, or even more) on virtually every issue which were not only mutually exclusive but stitched together entirely from lies and delusions.
Of course, the scope of his lyingness went mostly uncalled out. And so, despite my jubilation at the Obama victory, signaling an end to the long nightmare of the "Chimpy the Prez" Bush years, I was filled with foreboding considering how close McCranky made the final vote count, given the terrifying imbecility, dishonesty, and delusionality of his campaign. And it didn't take long to see the impact on governing of the Republicans' embrace of total dishonesty. While Obama himself would disappoint in a number of ways, for most everything he did try to do he would be largely thwarted by a Republican Party united on a single tactic: to sink the country in the shithole of its diseased imaginings in the hope of scoring tactical political advantage.
So I was less surprised than I might have been to have Young Johnny jumping into the Orlando swamp blithering -- as DailyKos's Brainwrap put it yesterday -- "something just as, if not even more insane and offensive than Donald Trump," calling President Obama "directly responsible" for the event, "due to [as Washington Post's Mike DeBonis puts it] his failure to combat the rise of the Islamic State terror group." Later the Crankyman claimed to have "misspoken," but I don't doubt that what he blithered was pretty much what he thought, for want of a better word.
ESPECIALLY WORTH NOTING IN GEORGIA L'S POST
IS THIS QUOTE ON GUNS FROM STANLEY McCHRYSTAL
It's from a NYT op-ed piece by the retired general called "Home Should Not Be a War Zone," on the subject of gun laws:
As this national crisis continues to rage, I ask my fellow veterans — patriots who have worn the uniform, who took an oath to protect our Constitution and the Second Amendment, who served this great country — to add your voice to this growing call for change. America needs you.
In my life as a soldier and citizen, I have seen time and time again that inaction has dire consequences. In this case, one consequence of our leaders’ inaction is that felons, domestic abusers and suspected terrorists have easy access to firearms.
Some opponents of closing these gaps in our laws will continue to argue that dangerous people will obtain guns in our country no matter what, and therefore that taking steps to make it harder for them is fruitless. That is both poor logic and poor leadership.
Has Hillary Changed Since She Unleashed The Clinton Machine On Obama In 2008?
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An old friend, the guy who made the video above, came over for a visit Sunday. It reminded me of what Bernie has been having to go through as he tries delivering his message about the corruption that has gripped the transpartisan Beltway establishment. I want to ask you to watch that short video clip. I want you to see it so you can watch how the same ugly, deceitful and divisive tactics the Clinton Machine is using to destroy Bernie comes right from the playbook she used against Obama in 2008. I had to laugh when I saw crooked conservative lobbyist Ed Rendell-- the piece of shit she and Wasserman Schultz conspired to put in charge of the Convention in July-- standing next to her in 2008 when she launched into one of her endless smears against Obama. Last week on NPR's Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me, conservative writer PJ O’Rourke announced that he plans to vote for Hillary if November comes down to the Lesser-of-two-evils contest between her and Trump many people expect. "I am endorsing Hillary," he told the audience. "And all her lies and all her empty promises. I am endorsing Hillary. The second worst thing that could happen to this country. But she’s way behind in second place, you know? She’s wrong about absolutely everything-- but she’s wrong within normal parameters!... I mean, this man just can’t be president of the U.S. I mean, they got this button, it’s in a briefcase, he’s gonna find it." And let's never forget the Evil Of Two Lessers.
The Wall Street banksters didn't just start financing her after Trump became the nominee. In fact, she's taking more money from the Finance Sector than anyone who ever served in Congress with the exception of Barack Obama, who has been collecting money from Wall Street for the last 7 years was president. Her $44,416,534 haul from Wall Street to date indicates she will soon catch up to Obama, just as she's left bankster shills John McCain and Chuck Schumer in the dust. Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal noted that she's "consolidating her support among Wall Street donors and other businesses ahead of a general-election battle with Donald Trump, winning more campaign contributions from financial-services executives in the most recent fundraising period than all other candidates combined... [Her] ability so far to draw the support of business donors, even those who lean Republican, suggests she is reversing the flow of Wall Street money toward the GOP ever since big banks, investment firms and hedge funds fell out of favor with President Barack Obama."
Mrs. Clinton’s popularity on Wall Street could prove a liability with some liberal voters, as primary rival Bernie Sanders has attacked her for being too cozy with the financial industry. But winning back a sizable chunk of money that went to Mr. Romney four years ago would likely give Mrs. Clinton a big fundraising advantage in the general election. ...The super PAC backing Mrs. Clinton, Priorities USA Action, is also heavily backed by Wall Street donors, who gave $18.7 million to the group through March, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. No other industry has given more to the super PAC.
Meanwhile another Clinton SuperPAC, the sleazy David Brock outfit, Correct the Record, apparently illegally funded by and coordinating with the Clinton Machine itself, is taking on the roll of social media enforcer for the slimy operation. As Evan Halper reported Monday for the L.A. Times "[w]hen "the Internet’s legions of Hillary hecklers steal away to chat rooms and Facebook pages to vent grievances about Clinton, express revulsion toward Clinton and launch attacks on Clinton, they now may find themselves in a surprising place-- confronted by a multimillion dollar super PAC working with Clinton. Hillary Clinton's well-heeled backers have opened a new frontier in digital campaigning, one that seems to have been inspired by some of the Internet's worst instincts. Correct the Record, a super PAC coordinating with Clinton's campaign, is spending some $1 million to find and confront social media users who post unflattering messages about the Democratic front-runner. In effect, the effort aims to spend a large sum of money to increase the amount of trolling that already exists online."
[U]sing a super PAC to create a counterweight to movements that have sprung up organically is another reflection of the campaign’s awkwardness with engaging online, digital pros said. “It is meant to appear to be coming organically from people and their social media networks in a groundswell of activism, when in fact it is highly paid and highly tactical,” said Brian Donahue, chief executive of the consulting firm Craft Media/Digital. “That is what the Clinton campaign has always been about," he said. "It runs the risk of being exactly what their opponents accuse them of being: a campaign that appears to be populist but is a smokescreen that is paid and brought to you by lifetime political operatives and high-level consultants.” The task force designed to stop the spread of online misinformation and misogyny is the brainchild of David Brock, a Clinton confidant who once made a career of spreading such misinformation and misogynistic attacks against her and Bill Clinton. His critics say he kept his taste for dirty tricks when he switched sides to become one of the Clintons’ most valued operatives. The mere mention of Correct the Record makes some critics seethe. Super PACs are typically prohibited from working in tandem with candidates, but Correct the Record is doing just that by exploiting a loophole in campaign finance law that it says permits such coordination with digital campaigns. “Clinton, herself, is saying we need campaign finance reform,” said Paul Ryan, deputy executive director of the Campaign Legal Center, an advocacy group. “Yet her lawyers are pushing the boundaries to get around campaign finance laws.”
Hey... what can I say? Watch the video again and then consider helping make sure Bernie wins next week's primaries in Oregon and Kentucky. Today Bernie faces off against her Machine in West Virginia and Nebraska where people really have come to just hate her and everything she stands for.
If that funny-talking Limey John Oliver thinks he can embarrass "Miss Mitch" McConnell, he's got another think coming
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John Oliver tells us all about the "Thurmond Rule" -- and
shows us Miss Mitch calling it "this rule that doesn't exist"
"If the President has trouble doing nothing, we will be more than happy to show him how it is done."
-- Senate Majority Leader "Miss Mitch" McConnell, as
quoted this morning by the Borowitz Report (see below)
by Ken
First, a confidential to whoever thought it was a good idea to have John Oliver's Last Week Tonight off HBO's airwaves for three months: WTF??? I assume there were Reasons. There are always Reasons, aren't there?) I just trust that somewhere among those Reasons there's some assurance that the LWT team will be on the job with only minimal interruptions between now and the election.
As probably everyone knows by now -- since by this morning I saw the lead item plastered all over the Internet (here, for example, is Marlow Stern at The Daily Beast) -- the LWT gang was back last night. And as John explains, that lead item hadn't been in preparation for three months. It was only precipitated by Saturday's of the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and the subsequent declaration by Senate Majority Leader "Miss Mitch" McConnell that his cabal of crackpots and thugs will not consider any nomination for a new Supreme Court justice which comes from President Obama. And never mind that the Constitution clearly makes such a nomination not only the president's right but his responsibility.
TO CATCH YOU UP ON THE STORY --
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a television appearance on Sunday, the leading Senate Republican warned President Obama “in no uncertain terms” against doing anything in his remaining three hundred and forty days in office.
“The President should be aware that, for all intents and purposes, his term in office is already over,” Mitch McConnell said on Fox News. “It’s not the time to start doing things when you have a mere eight thousand one hundred and sixty hours left.”
While acknowledging that the President has eleven months remaining in the White House, McConnell said that he and the President “have an honest disagreement about how long eleven months is.”
“The President believes it is almost one year,” he said. “I believe it is almost zero years. I’m not a mathematician, but I believe I am right.”
As for how Obama should spend his remaining time in office, McConnell said, “If the President has trouble doing nothing, we will be more than happy to show him how it is done.”
WELL, YOU KNOW THOSE RIGHT-WINGERS!
They don't answer to the law or the Constitution. They answer to a higher power: their megalomania and psychotic delusions.
Writing Saturday night, arguing that "we mustn't pretend that Justice Nino was anything but, you know, what he was," I may have surprised readers by being fairly accepting of Miss Mitch's declaration that his cabal will not allow consideration of an Obama Supreme Court nomination. But I was simply accepting the reality --
that as our system has evolved, there isn't much chance of Senate consideration of a Supreme Court nomination that's made in the final year of a presidential term, even though the Constitution doesn't offer any such proscription. But it is the reality, isn't it?
I did, though, add a footnote noting that if we were to play the game I'm so fond of, If the Shoe Were on the Other Foot, we could expect Miss Mitch and his fellow cabalists to sing a wildly different tune. "Of course," I wrote,
if it was a Republican president faced with a Supreme Court vacancy in February of the fourth year of his/her term, any attempt by Democrats to interfere with his/her constitutional responsibility to name a replacement would be greeted with choruses of right-wing outrage and cries of "tyranny!"
Even as I wrote, I had a hunch that some version of this game had already been played for real. Now the Last Week Tonight team has given us the video.
DOES THE THURMOND RULE EVEN APPLY HERE?
I confess that when I wrote Saturday, I was fuzzy on the exact time frame specified in what John explains is known as the Republicans' Thurmond Rule. That's why I took pains to describe the situation of a president "faced with a Supreme Court vacancy in February of the fourth year of his/her term." The LWT segment clarifies that the actual terms of the Thurmond Rule would disallow a presidential nomination for a lifetime judgeship in the last six months of his term. (Note: I don't think we have to say "of his/her term" where Strom Thurmond is concerned. For old Strom, the idea of a "her" president was probably as inconceivable as, say, the idea of a "colored" president.)
As John Oliver points out in the segment, the last six months of the Obama administration begin on July 20. Meaning that even under the Thurmond Rule-that-isn't-a-rule, we're nowhere near the Point of No Lifetime Judicial Nominations.
SO WHAT? DOES IT MATTER AT ALL TO MISS MITCH?
Is there any reason to think that Miss Mitch cares any more about the terms of the wholly extra-constitutional Thurmond Rule than he cares about American law or the Constitution itself? He answers to no authority but the "Fuck America!" ethos of the 21st-century American Far Right, whose overriding goal is to turn the country into the toxic cesspool that is their minds.
Because, after all, Miss Mitch has done a lousy job of keeping it secret that throughout the Obama presidency his entire objective has been to obstruct and destroy. Fuck America! If he can't have his diseased vision of a fascist autocracy, then just fuck it, and Fuck All the Americans Who Don't Matter, because that's what right-wingers want to do: Fuck All the Americans Who Don't Matter. Of course for our One-Percenters, which is to say the most important group of Americans Who Matter, there's money to be made off the misery of the Americans Who Don't Matter. And for those who sense -- some rightly, some wrongly -- that they're being screwed but nevertheless embrace right-wing ideology, there's some kind of primitive satisfaction to be had in seeing those other poor souls screwed.
Otherwise, how to explain the existence, let alone the actual popular followings, of life forms like The Donald, Rafael "Ted from Alberta" Cruz, and the world's most immoderate "moderate," Marco Rubio? What has appalled me most about the creatures who have made up the Republican presidential "fields" in this and the last couple of presidential election cycles isn't that their politics is so reactionary and stupid but that they are all such screamingly horrible, inexcusable people.
And in their various ways they have all cynically embraced, even encouraged, modern-day America's Flight from Reality, something I've been squawking about for years now. It's the triumph of reality-substitute over reality -- of, as Stephen Colbert framed it, "truthiness" over truth.
WE CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH
In that Saturday footnote in which I speculated about the application of the If the Shoe Were on the Other Foot game to Miss Mitch's declaration of policy-by-hissy-fit. So what if it were to turn out that Miss Mitch was being hypocritical?
For right-wingers nowadays, hypocrisy is considered not just "no foul" but a virtual obligation. If you aren't being hypocritical, it's assumed you aren't really trying.
After all, hypocrisy is the least of it. Reality and truth have been prime casualties of the rise of the modern Far Right. Somewhere in the formative years of the new century, under the influence of propagandists like Karl Rove and Roger Ailes, and under the unwatchful eye and imbecile grin of George W. "Chimpy the Prez" Bush, the Right formally went off the truth standard, disclaiming any obligation at all to reality or truth.
Where Chimpy's own presidency faltered, it wasn't for lack of truthfulness, after all. He was never held to account for any of the lies with which his administration's policies had been sold. But well before he left the White House, Chimpy had begun to disappear before our very eyes, and it seemed clear to me that the public wasn't looking to him for truth -- about the disastrous Iraq and Afghanistan policies, for example -- but instead was insisting on its right to newer and better lies.
Instead the people got the Great Financial Meltdown of 2008. And even then they didn't connect the dots: that there's a price to be paid for government by the One Percent for the One Percent. Similarly, if there's any price to be paid for Government by Lies, the bill comes due far, far down the line, and can usually be fobbed off on some poor, unsuspecting souls.
The Right's Grand Disconnect from Reality hit home for me in the 2008 presidential campaign of Young Johnny McCranky, in which the candidate managed not just to avoid ever speaking the truth about anything but on most issues to offer a minimum of two, and usually more, mutually contradictory lies. After the election, I looked at the number of votes McCranky had nevertheless scored, and couldn't help but think there was going to be a price to pay for the GOP's official Disconnect from Reality. Even so, I couldn't have imagined the 2012 and 2016 GOP presidential "fields."
And the hard core of Democratic officialdom managed to remain only a few steps behind, making it official party philosophy that the very most that Dems had to do was be just the merest hair's breadth better than the R's.
Ain't this a kick in the pants? Compared with the nutso ravings of Miss Mitch and The Donald and Ted from Alberta and the rest, Colonel Jessup's argument sounds reasonable.
BONUS: A SCENE FROM THE FLIGHT FROM REALITY
The great David Sipress is currently on "Daily Cartoon" duty at The New Yorker, and today's offering seems very much appropriate to the theme of "Reality as Perceived (and Promulgated) by the Modern-Day Right."
“I had a dream last night that Planned Parenthood
did something new and horrible to a fetus! We need to launch an immediate congressional investigation.”
Hillary's Attacks On Bernie Very Much Mirror Her Equally Ugly Attacks On President Obama
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One of Hillary's many bad moments during Thursday's debate was her psychotic attack on Bernie for being mean to president Obama. In the past we talked about how Hillary savaged Obama during the 2008 campaign claiming he wasn't as anti-NRA as she was, even though her own gun record is purely opportunistic and changed whenever she needed to appear on one side or the other-- the entire story of her life from the time she was a Goldwater Girl and the President of the Young Republican Club at Wellesley College right until the present day. Her attempt to turn Obama supporters-- especially African American voters in South Carolina-- against Bernie based on him being anti-Obama was especially hilarious in light of how vicious and negative she was during the 2008 campaign. Funny how she still hasn't learned that that's exactly why she lost the respect of Democratic voters and why they chose Obama over her. A little trip down memory lane, courtesy of Donald Trump's least favorite newspaper in the world:
Hillary Clinton's assault on Barack Obama shifted from outrage to heavy sarcasm Sunday, with the former First Lady mocking her rival as much as chewing him out for his tactics. Framing Obama as both a deceiver and a dream weaver, Clinton said "none of the problems we face will be easily solved." Then oozing derision, Clinton cracked, "Now, I could stand up here and say, 'Let's just get everybody together. Let's get unified. The sky will open. The light will come down. Celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect.'" Her remarks drew chuckles from a supportive audience gathered at Rhode Island College. "Maybe I've just lived a little long, but I have no illusions about how hard this is going to be," she said. "You are not going to wave a magic wand and have the special interests disappear." Clinton's mockery of Obama came a day after she railed, "Shame on you, Barack Obama," decrying what she termed deceptive mailings in Ohio about her stances on universal health care and the North American Free Trade Agreement. Later, in Boston, Clinton signaled she would continue her more aggressive approach against Obama. "I just have this sense that finally my opponent is getting maybe a little bit of scrutiny," she said. The New York senator has a narrow lead over Obama in the Buckeye State and is trying to regain ground after 11 consecutive primary defeats. Campaigning in Cleveland, Obama pushed back on the NAFTA issue, using quotes from Clinton's book to demonstrate her past support for the pact. NAFTA has been blamed for an exodus of jobs in pivotal states like Ohio, where Democrats vote March 4. "Ten years after NAFTA passed, Sen. Clinton said it was good for America. ... Well, I don't think NAFTA has been good for America-- and I never have," Obama said during a campaign stop at a wallboard factory. "The fact is, she was saying great things about NAFTA until she started running for President." Clinton has said on the campaign trail that the trade agreement-- which was passed during her husband's administration-- is problematic. Obama said Sunday that while he has issues with NAFTA, an attempt to repeal it "would probably result in more job losses than job gains in the United States." A Clinton spokesman retorted that Obama has spoken positively of NAFTA in the past: "Sen. Obama's insistence on repeating attacks that have been demonstrated to be false by independent entities proves once and for all that his speeches about the new politics are just words."
That's inconvenient
Her campaign then was-- and her campaign now is-- worthy of who she is, a former president of the Wellesley Young Republicans. One of her surrogates, a man I have always admired, John Lewis, attacked Bernie, who, like many people his age-- he wasn't an elected official or anything like that-- supported the Civil Rights Movement, on her behalf last week. "I never saw him. I never met him. I was chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for three years, from 1963 to 1966. I was involved with the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, the march from Selma to Montgomery and directed (the) voter education project for six years. But I met Hillary Clinton. I met President (Bill) Clinton." As Harry Belafonte pointed out on the Chris Hayes show Friday, John Lewis "never saw most of the people who were engaged." Watch the video: Lewis must have misremembered when he now claims to have met Bill and Hillary, because in the past he's written that he never even heard of Bill Clinton until the 1970s and didn't meet him until 1991.
