Lamenting the dearth of electoral votes in Canada, John McCain nonetheless went to Ottawa Friday to defend a free trade agreement opposed by Barack Obama.
??”There aren’t any electoral votes to be won up here in the middle of a presidential election,” McCain told a group of Canadian business and political leaders. “But there are many shared interests.”
??Chief among those, according to the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, is the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which Obama once called “a big mistake” that has had a “devastating” impact on the U.S. economy.
??”What truly would be devastating is to jeopardize the trade expansion of NAFTA through a misguided, isolationist impulse that would inevitably and understandably alienate a key partner like Canada,” McCain wrote in an op-ed for the Detroit Free Press. “Senator Obama does not understand this.”??
Obama spokesman Hari Sevugan responded by pointing out that President Bush, like McCain, supports NAFTA.??
“Even as McCain has acknowledged that trade agreements have cost America jobs, he has opposed funding for job training programs,” Sevugan said. “McCain is taking the straight talk express over the border to Canada to tout his support for NAFTA, and promise more of the same Bush approach that has left American families behind.”??
In February, Obama said the U.S. should threaten to pull out of NAFTA unless the agreement can be significantly altered.??
“We should use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage to ensure that we actually get labor and environmental standards that are enforced,” he said. “I don’t think NAFTA has been good for America and I never have.”
??But Fortune magazine reported this week that Obama, in a new interview, “backed off” his threat of unilateral withdrawal from NAFTA.
?”Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified,” Obama conceded.??
Meanwhile, the Obama campaign accused McCain of pandering to Hispanic leaders in Chicago by promising them in a closed-door meeting Wednesday that he would grant legal status to illegal immigrants. One of the leaders in the meeting turned out to be a conservative activist in the fight against illegal immigration.??
“He’s one John McCain in front of white Republicans,” groused Rosanna Pulido, the Illinois Minuteman Project, to the AP. “And he’s a different John McCain in front of Hispanics.”
