Members of the press were decidedly unimpressed when Hillary Clinton came out Wednesday against the White House’s trade deal with Pacific Rim countries, and it appears that criticism won’t let up any time soon.
“I don’t believe this is Hillary Clinton’s actual position on the deal,” said Bloomberg News’ Mark Halperin Thursday morning, echoing a sentiment widely shared by reporters and commentators on both sides.
Larry Sabato, director for the Center of Politics at the University of Virginia, said Thursday on CNN that Clinton’s change of heart is “transparently political. This is part of the presidential campaign’s panderama. She’s pandering.”
Vox’s Ezra Klein wrote Thursday morning, “I’m not convinced that Clinton, in office, wouldn’t … negotiate trade deals like the TPP. And as someone trying to understand Clinton’s likely governing philosophy, it’s unnerving.”
“And this is a broader problem for Clinton. Her political weakness, fairly or not, is that the voters and the media — or maybe it’s the media and, thus, the voters — have decided that she’s unusually poll-tested and calculating, even for a politician,” he added.
As secretary of State, Clinton played a crucial roll in getting the ball rolling on the White House-backed Trans-Pacific Partnership. She used to claim as much.
She also often praised the deal, saying at one point in 2012 that it “sets the gold standard in trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade, the kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field.”
“And when negotiated, this agreement will cover 40 percent of the world’s total trade and build in strong protections for workers and the environment,” she added.
Now, however, she claims she simply can’t support the deal.
Her campaign to distance herself from a plan that has drawn sharp criticism from labor unions began earlier this year when she claimed in July that she had minimum involvement in the crafting of the deal.
Considering that her about-face comes at a time when Democratic rival Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who has opposed the deal from the get-go, continues to rise in the polls, the press appears convinced that Clinton’s opposition is little more than political opportunism.
Clinton “needs those volunteers while campaigning and of course her opponents like Sanders and O’Malley had already come out against this new trade agreement. And she wants to box in Joe Biden who if he jumps in will have to defend President Obama’s decision to support it,” Sabato said.
