During the Ohio primary last month, Senators Obama and Clinton were in a race to show the people of Ohio which one of them was more anti-free trade and which of them was more against NAFTA. Senator Clinton’s problem was that her husband, the one whose administration she got all that "experience" in, proposed NAFTA and pushed hard to get it passed. Senator Obama’s problem was that his main economic adviser told Canadian government officials that Obama’s NAFTA-bashing was just "politics" and that Obama really didn’t mean it.
Well, John McCain is not having that kind of credibility problem. On Tuesday, Senator McCain went to Youngstown, Ohio, right in the middle of the old Ohio steel mill country. According to The New York Times:
"Mr. McCain kept up his free-trade-is-good message in this economically depressed city, a contrast to his Democratic competitors … .
Mr. McCain, who compared the struggles of Youngstown to his own back-from-the-dead campaign, insisted that in the end workers would be better off through retraining and education programs in technology he has promised them as president."
The Independent, a UK paper, quoted McCain as saying:
"The biggest problem is not free trade, but our inability to adjust to a new world economy. I can't look you in the eye and tell you that I believe those jobs are coming back... [but] protectionism and isolationism have never worked in American history."
Finally, back to The New York Times:
"‘I can’t tell you that these jobs are ever going to come back to this magnificent part of the country,’ Mr. McCain told another questioner, Sam Carbon, a student at Youngstown State, who asked Mr. McCain about how he planned to save American jobs. ‘But I will commit to giving these workers a second chance. They need it, they deserve it. I know that’s small comfort to you, but I can’t look you in the eye and tell you those steel mills are coming back.’"
Now that is a candidate to be proud of.
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