How Obama's Free-Trade Push Could Put Hillary Clinton in a Tight Spot
The presumptive Democratic frontrunner's strength with blue-collar white voters rests on the strong economy of the 1990s. But if NAFTA becomes an issue, it could weaken her.
Jim Young/Reuters
Hillary Clinton owes Harry Reid a solid. Why? Non-college-educated whites. Theyre both the promise of the widely expected Clinton presidential bid and its potential pitfall. And if Reid continues to stand in the way of the Obama Administrations trade agenda, it would help Clinton hold on to them.
Clintons image among non-college-educated whites hangs on the economic legacy of her husbands presidency, and sooner or later her opponents will try to spoil that image by making NAFTA a dominant symbol of that legacyassuming, of course, that she runs. To fend it off, Clinton will to need to offer a symbol of her own: NASDAQ. Personal attacks may be worn out, and Benghazi may not have two more years of juice in it, but the shifting economic ground could leave her vulnerable to a populist message from both the left and the right. And the Obama Administration could be inadvertently setting the trap for her.
In his State of the Union, Obama called for fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive free-trade agreement that represents an extension of the policies embodied in the 20-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement, championed and signed by Bill Clinton.
The further TPP negotiations progress, and the closer it comes to a vote in Congress, the more it will become the object of widespread public attention. The latest round of TPP talks commenced in Singapore on February 17. Meanwhile, theres another treaty on the horizon: Next month, negotiators will hold the fourth round of talks on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which would create a US-EU trade bloc and could be finalized by the end of the year. All this could open up a wide-ranging cross-partisan debate on free trade, much like the one weve seen on surveillance. Such a debate would threaten to put working-class whites perceptions of the Clinton economic legacy up for grabs. Right now, that legacy is of shared prosperity during economic boom times, symbolized by the tech-heavy NASDAQ, which grew by a factor of seven between Bill Clintons inauguration in 1993 and its Clinton-era peak in 2000.
But some liberal economists argue that the bursting of the dotcom bubble and later the great recession laid bare the legacy of NAFTA. According to a 2006 report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, the treaty led to the loss of an estimated one million American jobs in its first decade. A 2012 poll found that 53 percent of Americans wanted the government to do whatever is necessary to amend or leave NAFTA, while only 15 percent wanted to remain in NAFTA as-is. In 2008, Rassmussen found that 56 percent of Americans wanted NAFTA renegotiated, and Gallup found that 53 percent believed its effects on the U.S. economy were mainly negative, compared to 37 percent who considered them mainly positive. A January report by Public Citizen, a group that often criticizes free-trade agreements, found that NAFTA had contributed to downward pressure on wages and increased income inequality in the U.S as that issue shapes up to be a defining one in 2016.
The messaging challenge for Clintons opponents is to hang NAFTAand by extension inequalityaround her neck. Her challenge is to make sure the only association that voters draw between the Clinton Administration and the economy is a rosy-tinted view of the booming the 90s, and to avoid litigating how the eras economic policies played out after he left office.
Because if the focus turns to NAFTAs legacy, NASDAQ sours too. In that case, working-class whites looking back at the champagne-drenched IPOs (was there actually champagne? Too late, its already in voters minds) of the dotcom boom could start to see the stock offerings as the first steps in a long dance between Silicon Valley and Wall Street on top of their economic graves.
This would be a major shift. In 2008, after all, blue-collar white voters were Clintons final bulwark against Barack Obama. Obama tried to peel them away by promising to consider revising NAFTA, but when a leaked memo revealed it was just a political ploy, the issue was neutralized. But 2016 is shaping up to be a different race. John Edwards Two Americas motif aside, the themes of inequality and economic fairness werent the most resonant ones in that primary, which was over before the worst of the economic collapse struck. In January 2008, the unemployment rate was just 5 percent nationwide.
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How Obama's Free-Trade Push Could Put Hillary Clinton in a Tight Spot