President Obama’s push to finalize a far-reaching trade deal is weakening his standing with the Left, even though the White House and staunch Democrats are in lockstep on virtually every remaining item on his agenda.
The president is gambling that his position on trade will not soil the recent rave reviews from progressives for his populist rhetoric, growing reliance on executive action and disdain for offering olive branches to Republicans.
However, Obama may have miscalculated the level of animosity that the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade pact among 12 Pacific Rim nations, would inspire among labor interests and those who worry whether the Democratic Party will move to the center with the expected nomination of Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Though Obama sees the trade deal as important to his legacy, a growing number on the left insist it is bad for American workers.
“You have to draw your line in the sand on this — the White House mistakenly thinks that because we agree with them on everything else, we should give them a pass here,” a top AFL-CIO labor federation official told the Washington Examiner. “This is a big deal. They can try to smooth it over all they want. It is still going to stink.”
Labor groups have opposed a string of trade deals pushed by U.S. leaders over the past few decades.
Obama has attempted to appease the far-left wing of the party, as it appears that he and Republicans are moving forward on finalizing the trade pact.
“You saw firsthand a lot of past trade deals didn’t always live up to the hype,” Obama told a Cleveland audience last week, echoing his State of the Union address this year. “And that’s why the trade deal I’m negotiating now, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, would reform NAFTA with higher labor standards, higher environmental standards, new tools to hold countries accountable; would focus on the impacts it’s having on American workers, and would make sure that the rules of the 21st century economy in some of the largest markets in the world aren’t written by China.”
The pact with Pacific Rim nations does not include China.
The question now becomes whether left-wingers would view Obama’s action on trade as an isolated indiscretion or an unforgivable sin.
“I can see this being a bigger deal than one might otherwise expect because of the position that labor took on NAFTA and the callback this might bring for them from the Clinton years,” said Ryan Lamare, an associate professor of labor studies and employment relations at Pennsylvania State University. “This is a membership issue where their constituents are saying, ‘here we go again.'”
Obama is furiously scrambling to convince Democratic lawmakers to give him fast-track power, which would allow trade deals to go through Congress without amendment. With so much Republican support, though, Obama doesn’t need widespread Democratic backing.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership is unlikely to get through Congress, at least in the way Obama would like, if fast-track power is not granted to the president.
The 2016 politics surrounding the debate are impossible to ignore. Discontent with the likely trade deal and calls for Wall Street reform are among the central reasons certain Democrats are clamoring for Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to pursue a White House bid.
And Clinton is also aware that she could be viewed as insufficiently progressive on the issue, given the level of dissatisfaction with trade deals shepherded by her husband, President Bill Clinton.
The former secretary of state is scheduled to headline an event Monday with Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, to bolster her appeal to organized labor.
Clinton will certainly face questions over how she would differ with Obama on trade.
The White House, however, sees an easy rebuttal to qualms from progressives: What is the alternative?
In Republicans, critics don’t have a sympathetic audience on trade.
And some analysts questioned whether the Democratic base was picking the right fight with Obama.
“Labor groups are being a little bit disingenuous to try to make this their major political watershed moment,” Lamare argued. “This feels like an issue of a bygone era. It seems like we’ve moved beyond getting trade pacts passed to debating what they actually look like.”
