Hillary Still Won’t Say Anything about Her Position on Today’s Most Important Policy Debate

We’re told Hillary Clinton offered her position about the ongoing trade debate yesterday. I’m not really so sure. Her comments are, at best, besides the point, and at worst, completely meaningless.

At an event in Iowa:

The president should listen to and work with his allies in Congress — starting with Nancy Pelosi — who have expressed their concerns about the impact that a weak agreement would have on our workers, to make sure that we get the best, strongest deal possible. And if we don’t get it, there should be no deal. There are some specifics in there that could and should be changed. So I am hoping that’s what happens now — let’s take the lemons and turn it into lemonade.

Saying that she would like the “best, strongest deal possible” is like the political equivalent of a Bill Belichick presser. Which is not an unwise answer, it’s just a deeply cynical one. 

As to her suggestion of using Democratic leverage to get a better final deal with Asian countries, she’s still ignoring the key question before Congress (and that would face her, were she elected) — should the president get “trade-promotion authority” to negotiate a trade deal and bring it before Congress for an up-or-down vote?

My first reading of her comments roughly parallels what Paul Ryan spokesman Brian Buck said about them:

The answer is No. 2, as her spokesman quickly made clear: She does not have a public position on the TPA debate, but won’t outright say that.

Hillary’s comments meant — this isn’t exactly clear, and seems to have effectively confused the media — that she thinks Democratic skepticism about TPA, shown last week when they abandoned the president on a key vote, means Obama should listen to liberal Democrats more when it comes to negotiating TPP. That’s nice, but that isn’t the question at hand.

#related#If Hillary wants Obama to negotiate a deal of any kind, Congress has to pass TPA first. Maybe she’s suggesting House Democrats should support TPA in exchange for a promise from Obama that the deal will involve X or Y protections for workers, but that’s incoherent on a number of levels: It would hold up a number of trade deals over some specific issue in TPP, which Democrats could most likely vote down if they want to under TPA anyway. The commitment would also probably cripple the president in said negotiations.

And if that’s what Hillary wants to see happen, she should say that. As Buck pointed out, she probably does support TPA. She just prefers criticizing undetermined aspects of TPP, instead, because that’s easier politically. (She has a few counterparts on the other side of the aisle doing the same thing, by the way.) This isn’t a “wonk warrior” on the trail; it’s a relatively unskilled politician dodging the most important policy question her party faces right now.

UPDATE: Clarifying the absurdity of her position further, Hillary today dismissed the TPA debate as a “process issue.” This, decidedly, is not Nancy Pelosi’s or Barack Obama’s or anyone who cares about this issue’s view.

A longer version of her view, which I don’t think adds anything else, was delivered to an Iowa radio host:

I think that any trade agreement is going to be fraught with all sorts of problems. I’ve voted for them, and I’ve voted against them, and I voted against Fast Track in the Bush administration, so I am someone who has seen the pluses and the minuses of trade agreements. Our goals should always be to make as many winners as possible out of our agreements, and to make sure we protect American workers, and get rising wages [and] more jobs, and that it’s good for our national security.

I think that in today’s world it is a very hard road to manage any trade agreement, especially with so many parties. What I have advised, and [I] said it today, is that the president take the opportunity offered by staunch allies like Nancy Pelosi, who has been instrumental in him passing his program over the last six, seven years now, and try to figure out how to use this as leverage, to go back to the other countries and say: “You want a lot out of this. I need more. Our market is still the biggest, most consumer-friendly market in the world, but I can’t go forward unless I get X, Y, and Z from you. And I think that there is at least a potential opportunity for him to take this moment and, as I said, kind of turn lemons into lemonade — try to figure out how you could convince people who are convincible, not those who are so anti- or so pro that that you’re never going to enlist them — that you have answered some of the legitimate questions that have been raised, about wages, about dispute settlements, about other matters that are important to us. And here in Iowa, you would have a lot of winners who would potentially come out of a trade agreement, predominantly but not exclusively [in] agriculture. But in parts of Iowa, you’ve got a lot of people who feel like they lost before and they don’t want to lose again. And if you can’t persuade the persuadable, then it’s unlikely to get that agreement to a point where it will do what we hope it will do.