HILLARY’S TRADE TWIRLS

From a July 27 editorial in The Wall Street Journal: As Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton helped negotiate the yet-to-be-ratified Trans-Pacific Partnership and gave some 45 public speeches for TPP. Then to fend off the Sanders challenge, she renounced the final TPP text in October 2015, and getting tough on China, outsourcing and other specters became stump staples. By opposing TPP, she’s running against the last major initiative of a President of her own party, and the Philadelphia Democrats don’t seem to mind.

More remarkable is that no one takes her statements at face value. Her left- right critics think she’s setting up a trade double cross, while corporate CEOs assure us that she is merely making a tactical TPP feint and after the election she’ll push it through Congress. This perception of trade insincerity does match the Clinton record. In the 1990s her husband promoted the North American Free Trade Agreement and mostfavoured nation status for China, and she endorsed both in her 2003 memoir “Living History.”

In the 2007-2008 Democratic primaries, Mrs. Clinton said she would renegotiate the “mistake” that was Nafta, promised to defeat a pending deal with Colombia, and told an AFL- CIO town hall that a U. S.-South Korea pact would “put American jobs at risk.” At Foggy Bottom, she then lobbied Congress to pass the Colombia and Korea agreements, and she deleted her Nafta do-over faster than the emails on her private server.