Hillary Clinton Walks the Line Between Presidential Ally and AspirantIf there was one moment recently in which
President Obama could have used
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s help, it was on Sunday, as the president scrambled to salvage his trade deal, which had been halted by congressional Democrats.
Instead, Mrs. Clinton, now running to replace Mr. Obama, all but wagged a finger at her former boss. Though she had once hailed the agreement as the gold standard for “free, transparent, fair trade,” she bluntly suggested that the president should “listen to and work with” Democrats to improve the deal and ensure better protections for American workers.
If that cannot be done, Mrs. Clinton said, “there should be no deal.”
Her comments irked some White House aides, who were still stung by the setback on Capitol Hill and frustrated that Mrs. Clinton, who once championed the president’s trade agenda, was now distancing herself from it. Over the weekend, one report on CNN documented the 45 times when Mrs. Clinton had expressed robust support for the trade pact, which the president is eager to see passed as part of his foreign policy legacy.
“The fact is, she was there when this thing was launched and she was extolling it when she left,” David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Mr. Obama, said Tuesday. “She’s in an obvious vise, between the work that she endorsed and was part of and the exigencies of a campaign. Obviously, her comments plainly weren’t helpful to moving this forward.”
...But while placing most of the blame on Republicans, and not criticizing Mr. Obama directly, she also painted a bleak picture of America during the president’s tenure. It remains a place, she said, of “displaced jobs and undercut wages,” “too little investments in new businesses, jobs and fair compensation,” and a political system that is “paralyzed by gridlock and dysfunction.”
“We can’t stand by while inequality increases, wages stagnate and the promise of America dims,” she said.
...Mrs. Clinton’s comments on trade echo a similar moment for her in the 2008 Democratic primary, when she found herself challenged by Mr. Obama about her early support for the North American Free Trade Agreement. Her husband, President Bill Clinton, signed that agreement into law in 1993, but Democratic interest groups had soured on it.
“The fact is, she was saying great things about Nafta until she started running for president,” Mr. Obama said about Mrs. Clinton during their fight for the nomination.
...Underscoring the trickiness of the issue, Mrs. Clinton’s stance also did little to placate the liberal wing of the
Democratic Party, which has pushed her to come out against the trade pact and oppose efforts to give Mr. Obama the so-called fast-track authority.
In New Hampshire on Monday, after Mrs. Clinton played down her comments about trade by referring to that authority as merely a “process issue,” one of her Democratic opponents, Martin O’Malley, fired back.
“For the thousands of American workers whose jobs are on the line with TPP, fast track is not a ‘process’ issue, it’s a straightforward vote on their future and their livelihood,” said Lis Smith, Mr. O’Malley’s deputy campaign manager.
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