This story in the Canadian press asserts that regarding the “NAFTA-quiddick” story , the initial comment from a Canadian that got CTV interested in the story was about Hillary’s camp assuring the Canadian government to ignore the rhetoric, not Obama’s.
Like Riehl, I notice there’s a bit of a problem with the argument that this exonerates Obama, however. His campaign still initially insisted that the story on CTV was not true, and issued a flat denial. But there was a meeting between Obama economic adviser Austan Goolsbee and diplomats at Canada’s Chicago consulate, and that meeting did generate a memo sent to the top levels of the Canadian government saying that Obama’s anti-NAFTA rhetoric wasn’t to be taken seriously. (Interestingly, no equivalent memo was written regarding any conversations with the Hillary campaign, as far as we know.) Goolsbee can argue that he was misquoted or that something was lost in the context, but clearly something in that conversation convinced his counterpart that there was no serious chance Obama would repeal NAFTA, as he had been threatening to do on the campaign trail.
I notice lefty bloggers keep insisting this is a case of foreigners “interfering” on our elections. I’ll remember that next time some foreign newspaper urges its readers to write letters to voters in Clark County, Ohio on behalf of the Democratic candidate.
Hillary may be as bad as Obama in saying one thing on the trail and another to foreign governments. But I note that when first confronted with this story, the Hillary campaign was so confident that no conversations occurred that it said it freed any Canadian official from any guarantees of confidentiality in their conversations. That’s a pretty risky move to make if they’re lying and the conversations did occur.