Obama Camp Attacks Clinton Over 1993 Nafta Meeting

The Obama campaign is seizing on the evidence in the Clinton White House schedules that show she attended at least one meeting about Nafta.

“This is one of the most critical issues facing Americans workers,” said Roger Tauss, international vice president of the Transportation Workers Union, in a conference call just now. “Nothing played a bigger role in this than Nafta.”

He went on, “Senator Clinton likes to say on the campaign trail that she has always been a critic of Nafta. “Her White House schedules … show she played a major role in this bill.”

Transportation workers, Tauss said, “can take tough love if you don’t agree with us” but he added that his priority is to have a president who will “be straight with the American people.”

Obama campaign spokesman Robert Gibbs drew attention to one particular meeting, on Nov. 10, 1993—“just one week before Nafta passed,” he noted. He said that attendees at the closed-door meeting, who were reportedly international businesswomen, said it was “organized around” Clinton, and that she sought to enlist their “help in ensuring the passage of Nafta.”

Gibbs went on to say that people have been wondering “what was lurking in the White House schedules.”

“One thing she was hiding was the truth,” he said.

It became clear as the call went on that the campaign is only partially interested in criticizing Clinton’s actual position on Nafta, then or now. They are more intent on drawing attention to her alleged dishonesty—that “Clinton is willing to do absolutely anything to get elected," as spokesman Bill Burton has said more than once in the last few days.

In a campaign memo sent out earlier today, the Clinton campaign had this to say about the schedules and her position on Nafta: