Hillary Clinton announced her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal on Wednesday, breaking with her former boss President Obama and her own prior views on the subject in a move likely to be welcomed by the progressive wing of the Democratic party.
The free-trade pact now finalized between the United States and several other Pacific Rim countries is strongly supported by President Obama and congressional Republicans, but bitterly opposed by liberal Democrats in the House and Senate.
Clinton’s main rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders — he leads her in New Hampshire and is nipping at her heels in Iowa — has called the deal “disastrous” for American workers. On Wednesday morning, he urged Clinton, who has been quiet on the TPP for months, to take a public stand.
By Wednesday afternoon, the Democratic front-runner had heeded Sanders’s advice. “I have been trying to learn as much as I can about the agreement, but I’m worried,” Clinton told PBS’s Judy Woodruff, arguing that the deal appeared overly secretive, did little to cut back on Chinese currency manipulation, and gave unfair breaks to pharmaceutical companies.
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What I know about it, as of today, I am not in favor of what I have learned about it,” she said, later adding that though “we don’t have all the texts, I don’t have all the details, I don’t believe it’s going to meet the high bar I have set.”
#share#Clinton has kept silent on the TPP since shortly before she announced her candidacy this spring. But that wasn’t always the case. She repeatedly pushed for the agreement while serving as secretary of state, claiming it “set the gold standard in trade agreements” in 2012. And she praised it in her 2014 book Hard Choices as a key engagement tool for American diplomats working in the Pacific Rim. “It’s safe to say that the TPP won’t be perfect — no deal negotiated among a dozen countries ever will be — but its higher standards, if implemented and enforced, should benefit American businesses and workers.”
#related#The abrupt shift in stance comes less than a week before the first Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas — something one of her opponents wasted no time in emphasizing. “Wow! That’s a reversal,” former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley wrote in an e-mailed statement to reporters just minutes after Clinton’s interview aired. “I was against the Trans-Pacific Partnership months and months ago. . . . Secretary Clinton can justify her own reversal of opinion on this, but I didn’t have one opinion eight months ago and switch that opinion on the eve of the debates.”
— Brendan Bordelon is a political reporter for National Review.