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supernovasky said:
It really is a non-story. There is absolutely no proof, and both the Obama campaign and canadian embassy deny it.

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The Canadian government, spoke with Obamas senior economic adviser Austan Goldsbee.

The Obama Senior Economic Advisor has refused to say whether he had such a conversation with the Canadian government office in Chicago.

He also said he has been told to direct any questions to the campaign headquarters....

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lonestar2004 said:
CTV named names.

Austin Goolsbee.

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So what? Is it that hard to imagine that someone trying to smear a candidate by suggesting their campaign went to talk to another country about economic matters would choose the economic advisor for the campaign?

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If Goolsbee had not talked to officials in the consulate, all he has to say is "No, I did talk to them.

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vonhumboldt said:
We'll see if or when minutes of their supposed meeting is published. Right now, it's still just allegations of one man speaking with a Canadian official - what was actually said is unknown, if they did in fact meet. Perhaps my judgment was too hasty and I'll continue to suspend judgment until the full story is revealed.

Perhaps it's just a matter of Goolsbee just sweet talking in a rogue fashion and not an official Obama campaign platform. Perhaps Goolsbee was assuring the Canadian official that Obama does not intend outright cancel NAFTA if that was their belief, but to review it and try to renegotiate the trade deal - which is fine with me. I support free trade so as long as all parties involved (not just Wall Street) benefit.

We'll see how this unfolds.

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http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jrFPkleRZmbmPtPxHBGNAPSzfUtwD8V658RO0

Goolsbee is now admitting contact with a Canadian official but disputing the interpretation the Canadians made of his remarks concerning NAFTA.



Barack Obama's senior economic policy adviser privately told Canadian officials to view the debate in Ohio over trade as "political positioning," according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press

The memo is the first documentation to emerge publicly out of the meeting between the adviser, Austan Goolsbee, and officials with the Canadian consulate in Chicago, but Goolsbee said it misinterprets what he told them. The memo was written by Joseph DeMora, who works for the consulate and attended the meeting.

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The NAFTA Dance continued today as Barack Obama tried to move from populist to centrist within a fortnight of clinching the Democratic nomination.  Earlier, Obama tried wooing heartland voters by saying he would unilaterally opt out of free-trade deals, specifically NAFTA, while his economic adviser whispered to Canadian consular officials that Obama was just indulging in election-year pandering.  Team Obama insisted that Goolsbee was misquoted, but with the nomination in his hands, Obama now admits to the pandering -- http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/18/magazines/fortune/easton_obama.fortune/ --

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In an interview with Fortune to be featured in the magazine’s upcoming issue, the presumptive Democratic nominee backed off his harshest attacks on the free trade agreement and indicated he didn’t want to unilaterally reopen negotiations on NAFTA.

“Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified,” he conceded, after I reminded him that he had called NAFTA “devastating” and “a big mistake,” despite nonpartisan studies concluding that the trade zone has had a mild, positive effect on the U.S. economy.

Does that mean his rhetoric was overheated and amplified? “Politicians are always guilty of that, and I don’t exempt myself,” he answered.

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Keeping track of Obama’s positions feels like being a spectator at a table tennis match.  First he wants meetings with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (among others) without preconditions, then he only wants them if they agree to stop sponsoring terrorism and funding militias in Iraq, which sounds a lot like a “precondition” to everyone but Barack Obama.  He wants to pull all the troops out of Iraq, but then tells the Iraqi foreign minister that he will be the second coming of John McCain.  He tells AIPAC that he wants an undivided Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and then tells the Palestinians that he wants to divvy it up if that’s what they want.

Now we return to the scene of the first flip-flop to find another.  It’s great that Obama doesn’t exempt himself from being a politician, but wasn’t that the entire point of the Obama campaign — that he wasn’t just another politician?  Now the harbinger of New Politics, the man who would clean up DC, shrugs off an outright lie by calling it “overheated rhetoric”.

If we want just another politician, can we get one with some executive experience, military experience, and/or a legislative track record that exceeds what can be counted on the thumbs of one hand?

Obama wants voters to forget that when this issue first arose in March, Obama doubled down by insisting that the Canadians and Goolsbee had it wrong and that he opposed NAFTA.  Obama’s credibility keeps dissipating with every new day on the campaign trail.  Which Obama are we supposed to believe?  Can someone please strap a thermostat to his mouth to determine when he uses “overheated rhetoric” instead of telling us what he really thinks, if he now claims that a difference exists between the two?

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