Obama Campaign: Clinton Failed Upstate New York

Since Hillary Clinton brought up Nafta yesterday, the Obama campaign took the opportunity today to hold a conference call to, once again, attack her for distorting her record and, in the words of spokesman Robert Gibbs, her “so-called foreign policy experience.”

Gibbs called Clinton’s account of her position on Nafta “just as much as much of a stretch as her story about landing in Bosnia under sniper fire,” and as further evidence, he brought up her record as a New York senator.

He charged that she “failed to fulfill her promise” to bring 200,000 jobs to upstate New York. “Upstate New York actually lost 240,000 additional jobs,” he said, and went on to say that Clinton was instrumental in bringing a company called Tata Consulting Services—which specializes in “helping companies identify jobs that could be outsourced overseas” to Buffalo.

Congressman George Miller of California then came on the call, describing himself as someone who “worked very hard against” Nafta. He said that if Clinton opposed Nafta while her husband was president it was “was certainly a mystery of those of us in the congress at the time.”

“Why did she never speak to those of us who were principles [in working against the passage of Nafta]?” he asked, later adding, “We saw no evidence of that activity or that position.”

This issue has been raised before, both during Clinton's campaign for reelection to the senate, and during the presidential campaign.