Nafta Bashing Ends at Texas Line
Clinton, Obama
Try to Avoid Pact
Before Key Primary
By AMY CHOZICK and NICK TIMIRAOS
March 3, 2008; Page A13
SAN ANTONIO -- After weeks of hammering the North American Free Trade Agreement on campaign stops in Ohio, the Democratic presidential candidates are singing a different tune in Texas.
Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have had to adjust their messages as they have shuffled between hard-hit Ohio and robust Texas, where Nafta is largely seen as an economic boost to the state's border communities.
Saturday, Sen. Clinton dedicated her stops in Fort Worth and Dallas to talk of national security. Friday, she focused a speech in Waco on veteran's rights, because Texas has a large military population. Sen. Obama is keeping his Texas message squarely set on uniting the country. He omitted mention of Nafta at a rally here Friday night that attracted 8,000 people.
Ohio and Texas may sit on opposite sides of the economic spectrum, but they are both must-win states for Sen. Clinton. The two states, along with Vermont and Rhode Island, go to the polls tomorrow and offer 370 delegates. After 11 straight losses, the Clinton campaign is hoping victories in Ohio and Texas can rejuvenate the candidate's diminishing chance at the party's nomination.
A Clinton Caravan
In mid-February, Sen. Clinton led by double-digits in Ohio and Texas. But the Obama campaign has eroded those leads. A Reuters/C-Span/Zogby poll of likely voters puts Sen. Clinton ahead by 1% in Ohio and behind Sen. Obama by 4% in Texas.
Yesterday, the Clinton campaign kicked off a traveling bus caravan during which the New York senator or her surrogates will visit 88 counties in Ohio.
Sen. Obama has been slowing down his schedule. The Illinois senator held two Ohio rallies yesterday.
Sen. Clinton trails Sen. Obama in the overall delegate count with 1,276 delegates to his 1,385, according to the Associated Press; 2,025 are needed to secure the nomination.
As Ohio voters express concern over the economy and a shrinking manufacturing segment, Texas has seen its energy sector boom, and a growing high-tech industry has brought new jobs to places like Austin.
Last year, Texas's 3.1% job growth was triple the nation's 1% growth rate and topped the state's historic average of 2.8% for the third year in a row, according to a report issued last week by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Employment in the construction sector grew by 4.3%, while it fell by 2.9% nationally.
Shannon McCormick, 36 years old and an actor, attended an Obama event in Austin last week. When the talk turned to the economy, he shrugged. "Things haven't been so bad here," he said. "We're not losing jobs."
Ohio, meanwhile, posted a 6% unemployment rate in December, ahead of the national rate of 5%. Job growth in Cincinnati, for example, measured just 0.5%, compared with 1.7% for the nation beginning September 2006, largely because of the exodus of manufacturing jobs, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
Ohio has also been much harder hit by the fallout of the subprime-mortgage crisis. Foreclosure filings in the state shot up 88% last year, while Texas saw foreclosure filings fall by 4.5%, according to RealtyTrac, a company that monitors housing.
In Ohio, Nafta has become the ultimate symbol of antiglobalization sentiment and is a constant source of contention between the two candidates. The agreement went into effect under President Bill Clinton in 1994 and created what remains the largest trade bloc in the world based on the combined gross domestic product of its member nations: the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
Sen. Obama has consistently criticized Sen. Clinton for supporting Nafta during her husband's administration. "The fact is, she was saying great things about Nafta until she started running for president," he said on a recent visit to a factory in Lorain.
At a speech in Nelsonville yesterday, Sen. Obama attacked Sen. Clinton's proposal to create a "time out" on trade agreements until they can be reviewed. "The world will not pause," Sen. Obama said. "China's not pausing. India's not pausing."
New Radio Ad
Sen. Clinton has fought back with a new radio ad in which unemployed blue-collar workers talk about how their jobs have been moved overseas.
"Hillary has gone on the record saying that Nafta was a mistake," a woman says. "She wants to change it from free trade to fair trade," another worker says.
But the towns along the Texas-Mexico border have a very different impression of the trade agreement. In the past decade, Laredo has gone from an impoverished backwater to one of the nation's largest inland ports. Its population has grown from 72,000 in the early 1990s to 250,000 in 2006.
Sen. Clinton pointed to the Nafta paradox after an event focused on poverty in Hanging Rock, Ohio. "I'm well aware that many parts of our country have different views about trade. I was in Laredo as I said last week, and it has greatly benefited from trade," she told reporters. "We need to maintain the positive aspects [of Nafta] but get very specific on what we are going to do to fix it."
Focus on Foreign Policy
Nafta briefly fell off the agenda Saturday when the candidates were campaigning through Texas. Sen. Clinton instead focused on criticizing Sen. Obama's amount of foreign-policy experience.
"His entire campaign is based on a speech he gave at an antiwar rally in 2002, and I give him credit for making that speech, but it was not followed up with action," Sen. Clinton told reporters on board the campaign plane from Dallas to San Antonio.
The Obama campaign has in response pointed to Sen. Clinton's vote to authorize the war in Iraq.
"Sen. Clinton is right when she says she's been tested on national security, but it is a test she has resoundingly failed," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement.
Write to Amy Chozick at amy.chozick@wsj.com and Nick Timiraos at nick.timiraos@wsj.com |
