President Obama blamed the media for trying to exploit his feud over free trade with Sen. Elizabeth Warren and make it “personal” when he said it never has been.
“The issue with respect to myself and Elizabeth has never been personal,” he said. “I think it’s fun for the press to see if we can poke around on it.”
In reality, he said, he and the Massachusetts Democrat are on the same page on nearly ever other issue except trade, including Wall Street reform, raising the minimum wage and greater support for collective bargaining rights.
He also said he understood why some of “his earliest supporters” disagree with him with regard to his support for Trade Promotion Authority and a trade pact with 11 other Pacific Rim countries.
“Like me, they came up through the ranks watching plants close, jobs shipped overseas, and like me they have concerns over whether labor and environmental agreements are properly enforced — whether free trade ends up being fair and not just free,” he said.
But Obama said he is working to make the deal among 12 countries, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the most progressive trade pact in history with enforceable labor and environmental standards.
And if the U.S. is not there to write high standards into the trade alliances, China will be all too eager to step in and do so.
“It is my firm belief … that we are better off writing high standards, writing the rules for what is going to be the fastest-growing market in the world,” he said. “And if don’t, China will and other countries will … and our workers will eventually suffer.”
The president thanked Democratic senators from backing down from their trade revolt earlier in the week and agreeing to a compromise that allows a separate vote on a currency manipulation bill they had wanted while moving forward with the Trade Promotion Authority measure, which allows him to submit trade pacts to Congress for an up-or-down vote without amendments.
He declined to issue an expected veto threat of the currency-manipulation bill.
“I have expressed concerns about how the currency language was drafted,” he said. “But I have talked to [Sens. Chuck] Schumer and [Sherrod] Brown and others about it and how we look at language that has an impact on monetary policy,” he said.
For more than a week, Obama and the White House have engaged in some verbal jousting with Warren and her defenders over the merits of the trade bill and how the president is pursuing it.
On Wednesday, White House press secretary Josh Earnest pressed Brown for an apology to Obama after Brown accused him of getting too personal and using a form of sexism by calling Warren by her first name.
Earnest dismissed the charge, noting that the president calls several senators by their first names, including Brown, both in public and in private.
