Why Obama is happy to fight Elizabeth Warren on the trade deal (Yahoo! article) [View all]

[YoungDemCA]

This past week, as I had just reminded Obama, Warren launched her heaviest torpedo yet against the trade deal, alleging that some future president might use it as an excuse to undo the reregulation of Wall Street that Obama signed into law in 2010. In fact, as the White House quickly pointed out, language in the pact would expressly prevent that unless Congress voted to allow it.

Three days after that broadside, when we sat down at Nike’s headquarters outside Portland, Ore., Obama still seemed unusually irritated.

“Think about the logic of that, right?” he went on. “The notion that I had this massive fight with Wall Street to make sure that we don’t repeat what happened in 2007, 2008. And then I sign a provision that would unravel it?

“I’d have to be pretty stupid,” Obama said, laughing. “This is pure speculation. She and I both taught law school, and you know, one of the things you do as a law professor is you spin out hypotheticals. And this is all hypothetical, speculative.”
Obama wasn’t through. He wanted me to know, in pointed terms, that for all the talk about her populist convictions, Warren had a personal brand she was trying to promote, too.


“The truth of the matter is that Elizabeth is, you know, a politician like everybody else,” he said. “And you know, she’s got a voice that she wants to get out there. And I understand that. And on most issues, she and I deeply agree. On this one, though, her arguments don’t stand the test of fact and scrutiny.”

What’s mostly going on here, though, is that frustrated liberals see in the Asian trade deal an opportunity to draw the line on globalization, period. No one thinks this deal is going to be the ruin of American workers, when all is said and done. What they think is that there has to be a moment when industry loses and the country finally turns its attention to the things you can do for workers, like raising the minimum wage (a more than reasonable suggestion) and relaxing rules that make organizing more difficult.

Taking a stand against the trade pact is really just a way of taking a stand against 30-plus years of policies that favored business over everyone else.

And this is what so frustrates Obama, to the point where he would come to make his stand at the headquarters of a company reviled by labor, almost as a provocation. Obama, as his detractors have often pointed out, is a study in cool-blooded analysis and professorial debate; whatever his gift of oratory, his real passion is for the triumph of reason over histrionics.

So you can see how it would annoy Obama no end that no matter how many mitigating facts and figures he throws at the opponents in his own party, their determination to sink the deal only intensifies. What they really want, it seems to him, isn’t a better trade deal, but rather a time machine that can transport us all back to the moment before globalization began.

https://www.yahoo.com/politics/why-obama-is-happy-to-fight-elizabeth-warren-on-118537612596.html