Obama Shifts His Pitch For The Trans-Pacific Partnership - WaPo [View all]

[WillyT]

Obama shifts his pitch for the Trans-Pacific Partnership
By David Nakamura - WaPo
April 26 at 5:58 PM

<snip>

Pitching his Pacific free-trade initiative to business leaders last December, President Obama framed it as a foreign policy gambit: He mentioned the looming threat of China 18 times in remarks to the Business Roundtable.

Last week, while making the case to 200 liberal activists, Obama mentioned China only once.

Instead, in a 4,000-word address to Organizing for Action (OFA), Obama sought to place his trade pact alongside his signature domestic initiatives, including his health-care law, auto industry bailout, student loan consolidation and Wall Street reform.

The sharp shift in the way Obama is now presenting the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a 12-nation trade deal in the Asia Pacific region, illustrates his biggest challenge as he tries to wrap up a late-term policy victory over fierce opposition from fellow Democrats.

His critics on the left are calling the TPP a job-killing, big-business boondoggle aimed at satisfying K Street corporate interests. And that has put Obama under pressure to explain how the pact will help ordinary American workers and families. In his weekly radio address, he called the deal “vital to middle-class economics.”

It hasn’t been easy. Facing heat from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the AFL-CIO and even usually friendly MSNBC hosts, Obama has sounded incredulous that his progressive bona fides are coming under question.

“When people say that this trade deal is bad for working families, they don’t know what they’re talking about,” Obama told OFA, the advocacy group that evolved from his campaign apparatus. “I take that personally. My entire presidency has been about helping working families. I’ve been working too hard at this. I’ve got some of those folks who are saying this stuff after all I’ve done to help lift their industries up.”

It is a frustrating reversal of fortune for Obama, who was embraced in 2008 as the progressive darling of “hope and change.” Now, even his former secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom progressives abandoned in the 2008 primary, hedged recently in her support for the TPP as she lurches to the left to shore up support from the base ahead of her 2016 campaign.

<snip>

More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-shifts-his-pitch-for-the-trans-pacific-partnership/2015/04/26/6e420632-ea8c-11e4-aae1-d642717d8afa_story.html