Kautzman's AP GO PO Blog

Froma Harrop
The Providence Journal
February 22, 2008

“NAFTA bad” has become Democratic shorthand to explain the misery spreading through America’s industrial heartland.

Barack Obama threw this punch at Hillary Clinton: “She says, well, speeches don’t put food on the table. Well, you know what? NAFTA didn’t put food on the table in Youngstown, either.” He was trying to tie her to Bill Clinton’s role in pushing the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has called NAFTA “a mistake” and demanded a “time out” on new trade agreements.

May I suggest a “time out” on bashing free trade with our Canadian and Mexican neighbors? Life would be awfully easy if NAFTA were the problem. All you’d have to do is pull out.

The evidence points to NAFTA being mostly good for the countries involved. And if American factory workers want to see where their jobs have gone, they’d do better to look east than south. Labor may be cheaper in Mexico, but it’s cheaper still in Asia. Chinese workers make about a quarter of what their Mexican counterparts earn.

In 2007, the U.S. trade deficit with China hit $256 billion. The deficit with Mexico, despite reaching an all-time high of $74 billion, was less than a third as big, and a lot of it was from buying Mexican oil. The U.S. trade deficit with Canada, which also has a lot of oil, was not far behind at $64 billion.

When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, Mexico lost much of any advantage that NAFTA gave it. Hundreds of Mexican factories have since closed and also moved to China.

But somehow the populist anger against trade tends to get trained on Latin America. We saw all the outrage heaped on the Central American Free Trade Agreement, or CAFTA, in 2005. The combined economies of those five poor countries, plus the Dominican Republic, roughly equaled that of New Haven, Conn.

More recently, the free-trade agreement with Peru has been denounced as “a NAFTA-style trade deal.” Peru’s gross domestic economy is the size of Utah’s. Clinton and Obama, despite their campaign rhetoric, voted for the accord and were right to do so.

NAFTA knockers who fear sounding anti-Mexican often argue that free trade has been bad for Mexico, as well. They offer vivid examples, such as the peasant farmers protesting the end of tariffs on U.S. corn. Corn production is easily mechanized and relies on abundant water. That gives U.S. farmers a competitive advantage.

But NAFTA has opened the enormous U.S. market to Mexican avocado growers – who now call their fruit “green gold.” For avocados and other produce that requires picking by hand and therefore much farm labor, Mexicans have an advantage. In fact, Mexican farm exports to the United States and Canada have tripled since 1994.

Mexico’s gross domestic product has doubled in the last 10 years, poverty is down, and the march to social liberalization continues. Mexico is no longer a very poor country – it just seems so next to us.

Revisiting NAFTA won’t fix what hurts the Ohio River Valley. A better approach would be universal health coverage that protects laid-off workers from total economic meltdown. A more vigorous program for job retraining would also help. And yes, Democrats are right to denounce tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas.

The sight of closed American factories – those broken windows and weed-covered parking lots – sickens the soul. The inescapable reality, though, is that the jobs that were going were going, if not to the Caribbean and Latin America, then to Asia. Wouldn’t it be in America’s interests to help our neighbors get the work?

Robert Scheer
Creators Syndicate
February 22, 2008

The resignation of Fidel Castro is more promising for the burnishing of his legacy than the mostly septuagenarian Cuban hard-liners in Miami and their fawning allies in the Bush administration would like to believe. After all, Mao Zedong is still honored in communist China, the fastest growing capitalist power in the world, and former KGB agent Vladimir Putin is, at least for now, a very popular elected Russian leader.

Those hoping for a “freedom flotilla” of Cuban exiles returning to remake Havana in the image of 1959, threatening the very future of Las Vegas with legalized prostitution as well as gambling, are likely to be disappointed. Odds are that Castro’s successors, beginning with his rhetoric-weary brother, are likely to finally get serious, after decades of fitful starts and reversals, about ending the grip of a moribund statist economy.

Reform leading significantly down the path of the Chinese model, or more appropriately Venezuela, which has thrown a lifeline to the ailing Cuban economy, is more likely than sudden upheaval.

But those changes will come too late to justify the suffering of the Cuban people for half a century at the hands of a revolutionary, as arrogant as he is idealistic, who witnessed his vision founder on the rocks of an incredibly cynical U.S. policy. Prime responsibility for that suffering does go to the Colossus of the North, which in the pursuit of economic exploitation and Cold War paranoia, consistently preferred Latin American dictatorships to serious experiments in popular rule and strangled the Cuban economy with an embargo in place for the almost five decades since Castro dared move against the U.S. corporations that claimed to own much of the island.

If Castro had attempted to listen to the better angels of his fervid imagination and pursued the path of democratic socialism rather than communist dictatorship, his effort most likely would have been subverted by the CIA, as was the case throughout the world – but it was an effort worth making.

That was the promise of Castro’s famous 1953 speech, as he defended himself following the attack on the Moncada Barracks. It was offered as a jailed young revolutionary dreaming of genuine populist power, and even he must have doubts as to whether, as he predicted back then, “history will absolve me” for the price paid in individual freedom for the revolution’s survival in power.

Not that the United States was likely to easily accommodate any populist challenge, as has been shown by the hysterical reaction to Venezuela’s finally sharing some of the oil loot with the poor. The failure of Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution to provide a democratic socialist alternative was sealed by the decision of John F. Kennedy, that inexplicable hero of American liberalism, to invade an island that posed no threat to the United States. The United States had backed the brutal dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, and the Kennedy administration even enlisted Mafia thugs, who had the run of Havana under Batista, in a failed attempt to assassinate Castro.

Only months into his presidency, Kennedy ramped up the Cold War that Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower had done his best to tamp down by committing the United States to military confrontation on opposite ends of the world.

In a subversion of Eisenhower’s decision not to send U.S. troops to Vietnam, Kennedy lied to the American public as to the purpose of his decision to send “flood control” advisers to Saigon as well as the U.S. complicity in the death of Ngo Dinh Diem, the U.S. puppet once proclaimed the George Washington of Vietnam and then summarily murdered in a hit job overseen by Kennedy’s CIA operatives. And just as Eisenhower had resisted calls to overthrow Castro in reprisal for his nationalizing American-owned power grids, nickel mines and sugar plantations in Cuba, Kennedy, in the first months of his administration, authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Yes, the dumbest moves of the Cold War were authorized by a lionized Democratic president and accelerated by his successor, another grand Democrat, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Both, as proven by the record of memoirs, academic research and, in Johnson’s case, White House tapes, were motivated by a fear of appearing weaker on national security than their Republican rivals. It provides a cautionary tale in considering the current presidential sweepstakes.

How easy it is to claim to champion universal human rights when you exempt your own country from judgment. When did the United States ever care about human rights in Cuba, or anywhere in Latin America before Castro, if it conflicted with the rape of the region’s resources? And what a mockery we have made of the cause of democratic rule when our president, twice elected by the people, has created one of the world’s most fearsome symbols of torture on the U.S. “liberated” territory of Guantanamo, Cuba.

In Ohio, Clinton Has Small Edge

By Dan Balz and Jon Cohen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, February 22, 2008; A07

AUSTIN, Feb. 21 — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, facing a pair of big Democratic primary tests on March 4 that could determine the fate of her presidential candidacy, is deadlocked with Sen. Barack Obama here in Texas and holds a slender lead over him in Ohio, according to two new Washington Post-ABC News polls.

The closeness of the races in Texas and Ohio underscores the challenges facing Clinton over the next 12 days of campaigning as she seeks to end Obama’s double-digit winning streak in their battle for the Democratic nomination. Those victories have given Obama a lead in delegates to the national convention and have put Clinton’s candidacy at risk unless she can rack up a string of big victories of her own.

In Ohio, Clinton leads Obama in the new poll by 50 percent to 43 percent, a significant but tenuous advantage given the shifts that have taken place in advance of previous primaries as candidates intensified their campaigns. In Texas, the race is about even, with Clinton at 48 percent and Obama at 47 percent.

In recent contests in Virginia and Wisconsin, Obama cut into Clinton’s coalition, a potentially significant change in the Democratic race. At this point in Ohio and Texas, Clinton is doing better than she did in those states among her more reliable voters, but she has yet to make deep inroads into Obama’s core supporters.

The Post-ABC News polls show Clinton with solid support from white women, seniors, voters with less education and those with lower incomes in both Ohio and Texas. She holds a big lead among Hispanics in Texas. Obama has large advantages among independents, African Americans and better-educated voters in both states.

Clinton advisers have expressed optimism about her prospects in the two contests, but the new polls suggest that the momentum Obama achieved in his string of victories has turned both into true battlegrounds. Clinton’s husband, former president Bill Clinton, said this week that she must win Texas and Ohio to keep her candidacy viable.

In Ohio, the economy and health care are roughly tied for the top spot on voters’ agendas, while in Texas health care is the clear No. 1 concern, followed by the economy and Iraq. In Ohio, the war in Iraq also comes in third place, but far below the other two; just 9 percent of voters there called it their most important voting issue.

Obama and Clinton supporters in both states are highly enthusiastic about the candidates, and more than seven in 10 said they definitely will stick with the candidate they have embraced. But that leaves a sizable number of likely voters in both states either undecided or open to changing their minds between now and primary day.

The Democratic electorates in the two states hold both candidates in high regard, with more than seven in 10 saying they would be satisfied with Obama or Clinton as their party’s nominee in November. More than six in 10 said they believe either candidate could defeat Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, in the general election, although when they were asked who has the better chance, Obama came out ahead by 11 percentage points in both Ohio and Texas.

Democratic voters in both states are split evenly on the attributes they are looking for in a nominee — strength and experience, which have been Clinton’s calling card, or fresh ideas and a new direction, which embody Obama’s message. Almost eight in 10 Democratic voters favoring strength and experience in a candidate back Clinton, and roughly the same proportion of those seeking change opt for Obama.

Most in both states view Clinton as the stronger leader, but majorities in Ohio and Texas said Obama has the experience to serve effectively as president. About four in 10 said Obama does not have the necessary resume.

Obama holds only narrow edges in both states on the question of who “would do the most to bring needed change to Washington,” and about seven in 10 said Clinton would do enough to set a new course.

The two candidates run about evenly as the one more in touch with “people like you.”

On the issues, Clinton has big head-to-head leads on handling the economy and health care, while the two are more closely matched on dealing with the war in Iraq and immigration.

Obama campaign officials have argued that victories in Texas and Ohio alone would not be enough to put Clinton on a path to the nomination. Given Obama’s lead among pledged delegates, now in the neighborhood of 150, Clinton would need big wins to make real gains in the delegate count, because of Democratic Party rules that award delegates proportionally on the basis of the popular vote.

The Texas system in particular, which includes both a primary and caucuses on the same day, may benefit Obama, who has excelled in previous caucuses. Given the closeness of the race, that system will make it all the more difficult for Clinton to come out of the state with a big gain in the overall delegate battle.

But Clinton campaign officials counter that victories for her in Ohio and Texas would seed doubts about Obama because he would by then have lost the vast majority of the most populous states that have voted. The Clinton camp hopes such doubts would prompt the superdelegates — members of Congress, governors and party officials who have automatic voting rights at the convention and who may hold the balance of power in the nominating battle — to rethink the race.

The demographic contours of the two upcoming contests provide insights into what each candidate needs to do over the next two weeks to win.

Clinton holds sizable leads in Ohio and Texas among white women — 17 percentage points in Texas and a whopping 35 points in Ohio. She is doing well among white men in Ohio as well, leading Obama by 12 percentage points in that group. In Texas, Obama leads among white men by 10 points. If Obama were to stay stuck at 40 percent among white men in Ohio, it would be one of his worst showings among those voters since Super Tuesday.

Seniors break for Clinton by wide margins in both states; Obama’s only win so far among older voters was in Virginia, according to network exit polls.

Obama has overwhelming leads, roughly 4 to 1, among black voters in both states. But Clinton has solid support in the Hispanic community in Texas, leading Obama by about 20 percentage points among a group of voters who proved crucial in her victories in California and other Super Tuesday states.

Clinton is seeking to hold two other core groups in her once-strong coalition — less-educated, lower-income white voters and self-identified Democrats. By focusing on the economy, particularly in Ohio, she hopes to prevent the kind of shift to Obama seen in Wisconsin on Tuesday.

The Post-ABC News polls show her with wide leads among white voters with annual family incomes under $50,000 in both states, and with a 16-point advantage among those from union households in Ohio. She leads Obama by 11 points among white voters in Texas who do not have a college degree and by 38 points among those voters in Ohio. Obama will need to cut into that margin in Ohio if he hopes to overtake Clinton there.

Independents lifted Obama to many of his early victories, but he has also carried the support of mainline Democrats since Super Tuesday. These new polls, however, show Clinton leading Obama by double-digit margins among Democrats. Both Ohio and Texas hold open primaries, in which any registered voter may cast a ballot.

The polls were conducted by telephone Feb. 16 to 20, among random samples of 611 Ohio adults and 603 Texas adults likely to participate in the Democratic primaries in those states. Sampling-error margins are plus or minus four percentage points for the full samples; error margins are larger for subgroups.

Cohen reported from Washington. Polling analyst Jennifer Agiesta in Washington contributed to this report.