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  Is Obama Lying About NAFTAGate?
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ContributorScott³ 
Last EditedScott³  Mar 04, 2008 10:30am
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News DateTuesday, March 4, 2008 04:25:00 PM UTC0:0
DescriptionNational Review.

"For the last several months, the tone of the Democratic presidential debate on the issue of trade has worried government officials in Canada and Mexico. Would a President Barack Obama or a President Hillary Clinton actually pull the U.S. out of the North American Free Trade Agreement? It’s a nightmare scenario in Ottawa and Mexico City — not to mention Washington — and Canadian and Mexican officials have tried as best they can to gauge just how sincere the criticisms of NAFTA coming from Obama and Clinton really are.

Those criticisms have been particularly intense in the run-up to today’s primary in economically struggling Ohio. At last week’s debate in Cleveland, Obama and Clinton dueled to see who could be more anti-NAFTA; Obama won, at least rhetorically, by promising to “use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage” to renegotiate NAFTA on his own terms.

Did he mean it? Or was he just telling steelworkers in Ohio what they wanted to hear? That is the question behind the first real scandal of the Obama campaign. And while the campaign has made several statements on the issue, there are growing indications that officials there are not telling the whole story.

It began last week, when Canada’s CTV television network reported that, in early February, a rep. of the Obama campaign assured Canadian officials that they need not take Obama’s NAFTA threats seriously, that those threats were just political rhetoric intended to win Midwestern primaries. The campaign, and the Canadian government, initially denied everything. “The Canadian ambassador issued a statement saying that the story was absolutely false,” top Obama adviser Susan Rice said Thursday night on MSNBC. “There had been no such contact. There had been no discussions on NAFTA.” Obama himself, asked about the story the next day, said, “It did not happen.”

But it turned out that there had been contact, and something did indeed happen."
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