(Photo: AP/Andrew Harnik)
Hillary Clinton and her allies are engaged in an awkward balancing act as they try to form a united front lambasting Donald Trump for what they call his phony trade populism, even as they struggle to settle trade disputes within the Democratic Party.
While Clinton has committed herself to renegotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership, progressive opponents of the 12-nation trade agreement are furious that the party's platform committee has failed to decisively oppose the trade deal as it currently stands.
Last week, Clinton supporters on the Democratic National Committee's platform-drafting committee voted down an amendment that would have asserted that President Obama should not send the TPP to a lame-duck Congress for a vote after the election-a prospect that some observers say would assure passage with Republican support. The measure had been proposed by a Bernie Sanders ally, Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison.
Instead, the committee approved a position stating merely that any trade deal "must protect workers and the environment," and citing "the diversity of views" on the deal-a clear signal that committee delegates are wary of undercutting Obama's support for the TPP. This despite the fact that, last year, 85 percent of House Democrats voted against fast tracking the deal.
"I was really quite surprised to see that Secretary Clinton's delegates rejected our proposal to kill the TPP, despite the fact that she has indicated she does not want to see it get onto the floor [of the U.S. Congress]," Sanders told MSNBC Tuesday.
Now the Sanders campaign is frantically working to rally support from labor, environmental, human rights, and other grassroots organizers to pressure the full platform committee to revisit the amendment and approve it when the committee meets in Orlando again on July 8.
"This needs to be fixed," Larry Cohen, a senior adviser to Bernie Sanders and former president of the Communications Workers of America, told the Prospect in an interview. "It's way out of line and totally inconsistent with [the Clinton campaign's position]."
Cohen says the campaign expects a petition instructing the DNC to explicitly oppose the TPP to get hundreds of thousands of signatures in time for the Orlando meeting, which could be trade opponents' last chance to add the amendment before the party meets for its convention on July 25-28 in Philadelphia.
"We're going to make sure that people understand: Words pale in comparison to deeds that give the Chamber of Commerce, multinational corporations, and countries like Vietnam and Brunei everything they want," Cohen says.
In order to pass the amendment, a majority of the 187 DNC platform committee delegates must vote in favor of it. The Sanders campaign has 70 delegates, according to Cohen, and several more platform committee members are also members of unions. Cohen says the campaign expects labor groups, especially the AFL-CIO, to help mobilize support.
"We oppose a lame duck session on TPP, as does Hillary Clinton," AFL-CIO Director of Communications Eric Hauser said in a statement to the Prospect, but did he not comment on whether the labor federation will actively lobby delegates to support the amendment.
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Meanwhile, the intra-party rift is chum in the water for Donald Trump.
On Tuesday, the likely Republican nominee lashed out at Clinton for her past support for trade deals, including TPP. When she was Obama's secretary of state, Clinton called the TPP the "gold standard" of trade deals. However, she switched stances in October-a move that many attributed to Sanders's aggressive anti-TPP campaign positions.
"Hillary Clinton was totally for the TPP just a short while ago, but when she saw my stance, which is totally against, she was shamed into saying she would be against it too," Trump said in a speech in Pennsylvania on Tuesday. "But have no doubt, she will immediately approve it if it is put before her, guaranteed."
Trump continued, "Here's how it would go: She would make a small token change, declare the pact fixed, and ram it through. That's why Hillary is now only saying she has problems with the TPP 'in its current form,' ensuring that she can rush to embrace it again at her earliest opportunity."
Clinton is clearly hesitant to deliver an aggressive anti-TPP message that would largely go against her campaign's message of building off Obama's administration. With bubbling dissidence in the Democratic Party's own ranks, the discord is making it difficult for her to deliver a coherent message on trade. The solution for her and her allies thus far has been to keep the focus on Trump, casting him as a hypocritical outsourcer of American jobs and an opportunistic opponent of the TPP-his company's ties are made in Mexico; his shirts manufactured in China and Bangladesh; furniture manufactured in Turkey; and so on.
"Donald Trump talks a good game on trade, but his first and only loyalty is to Donald Trump," AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said Tuesday at a conference on international trade held by the labor federation. "Trump embodies everything that is wrong with our current trade policy, and he's personally profited from NAFTA. … He has consistently sent American jobs overseas to line his own pockets."
Unlike many who question Clinton's commitment to opposing TPP, Trumka says he doesn't think she'll flip-flop again.
"If she gave a wink and nod, she would start off her presidency in the hole by losing a vast majority of those who have supported her," Trumka told The Washington Post. "She's too smart, too committed, and I believe she has too much resolve to make that kind of stupid mistake."
