Flip-Flop or Copycat?

Here’s Democratic Party Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on international trade.

As Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton helped negotiate the yet-to-be-ratified Trans-Pacific Partnership and gave some 45 public speeches for TPP [TransPacific Partnership].

Then

…to fend off the Sanders challenge, she renounced the final TPP text in October 2015….

This isn’t new.  When Bill Clinton was pushing NAFTA, so did Hillary Clinton, and she repeated that in her memoir.  Then in her first Presidential campaign, she vowed to “renegotiate” NAFTA.

In that campaign, she assured her hoped-for union voters that she’d not conclude the sort of trade deals then in the offing with Cambodia and the Republic of Korea.  Once safely ensconced in the State Department, though, she put all of that Cabinet’s influence to work pushing for passage of exactly those deals (and tried to delete from her official State Department business personal email server NAFTA-related emails).

Here’s her chosen nominee, Senator Time Kaine (D, VA) on international trade, with the proposed TPP as his vehicle.

I am having discussions with a lot of groups around Virginia about the treaty itself. I see much in it to like.  I think it’s an upgrade of labor standards, I think it’s an upgrade of environmental standards. I think it’s an upgrade of intellectual property protections.

That was just prior to the Democratic Party Convention.  Here he is, now that he’s running for Vice President.

Kaine said he agreed with Clinton—who had helped negotiate the trade deal as secretary of state but now opposes as the Democratic presidential nominee—that the TPP did not meet certain standards on wages and national security.

Either way, this doesn’t predict a very stable administration, rather it suggests that Clinton and Kaine would change course with the winds of convenient politics.

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