John Nichols, The Nation, February 14, 2008
JANESVILLE, Wisconsin — When I talked with Russ Feingold last week about what the Democratic candidates for president should do to win Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary, he suggested that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton should go to the senator’s hometown of Janesville and talk about trade.
Obama got the hint.
On Wednesday, the first full day of a Wisconsin primary campaign that he hopes will solidify his emerging lead over his once “inevitable” rival, the Illinois senator started in Janesville, where he delivered a rebuke to free-trade policies of the Bill Clinton and George Bush eras that sounded a little like a speech Feingold might have delivered.
“We are not standing on the brink of recession due to forces beyond our control. The fallout from the housing crisis that’s cost jobs and wiped out savings was not an inevitable part of the business cycle. It was a failure of leadership and imagination in Washington — the culmination of decades of decisions that were made or put off without regard to the realities of a global economy and the growing inequality it’s produced,” Obama told workers at the General Motors Assembly Plant in the southern Wisconsin city.
“It’s a Washington where decades of trade deals like NAFTA and China have been signed with plenty of protections for corporations and their profits, but none for our environment or our workers who’ve seen factories shut their doors and millions of jobs disappear; workers whose right to organize and unionize has been under assault for the last eight years,” continued the senator, who is suddenly very conscious of the need to appeal to working-class voters in Wisconsin and Ohio who have been battered by trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the decision the Clinton administration to extend permanent most-favored-nation training status to China.
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Obamanomics: Barack Talks Tough on Trade
John Nichols, The Nation, February 14, 2008
JANESVILLE, Wisconsin — When I talked with Russ Feingold last week about what the Democratic candidates for president should do to win Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary, he suggested that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton should go to the senator’s hometown of Janesville and talk about trade.
Obama got the hint.
On Wednesday, the first full day of a Wisconsin primary campaign that he hopes will solidify his emerging lead over his once “inevitable” rival, the Illinois senator started in Janesville, where he delivered a rebuke to free-trade policies of the Bill Clinton and George Bush eras that sounded a little like a speech Feingold might have delivered.
“We are not standing on the brink of recession due to forces beyond our control. The fallout from the housing crisis that’s cost jobs and wiped out savings was not an inevitable part of the business cycle. It was a failure of leadership and imagination in Washington — the culmination of decades of decisions that were made or put off without regard to the realities of a global economy and the growing inequality it’s produced,” Obama told workers at the General Motors Assembly Plant in the southern Wisconsin city.
“It’s a Washington where decades of trade deals like NAFTA and China have been signed with plenty of protections for corporations and their profits, but none for our environment or our workers who’ve seen factories shut their doors and millions of jobs disappear; workers whose right to organize and unionize has been under assault for the last eight years,” continued the senator, who is suddenly very conscious of the need to appeal to working-class voters in Wisconsin and Ohio who have been battered by trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the decision the Clinton administration to extend permanent most-favored-nation training status to China.
Read More Here