Deal Reached on Fast-Track Authority for Obama on Trade Pact

[pampango]

35. I doubt Obama will attempt to avoid 'blame'. Unlike NAFTA, all the negotiations for the TPP were

done during by a Democratic administration - Obama's.

With NAFTA, the negotiations were largely done under Bush I then handed off to Clinton in 1993. He decided not to trash it - and probably anger Canada and Mexico which had spent years negotiating it - but to make some changes and then push it through congress. Who knows what NAFTA would have looked like if Clinton had been in on its beginning. While Clinton does get 'blamed' for NAFTA, it was not his project to nearly the extent that the TPP is Obama's project.

Democrats have always pushed trade. From Wilson and his "the removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade"; to FDR with his Reciprocal Tariff Act of 1934 and International Trade Organization; to Kennedy and the Kennedy Round of GATT and so on and son. Republicans fought all of these until Reagan.