More frustrating is how the fixation on NAFTA leads to pandering. And both Obama and Clinton are guilty of this. Every denizen of rust-belt America knows that the industrial decline and outflow of jobs is a lot more complicated than NAFTA. The overly simplistic, almost cartoonish political image of this one piece of legislation creating the region's problems in the midst of an endlessly complex global economic transformation is beneath us all. Maybe it's because our part of southeastern Ohio is so rural and so poor that we never had any steel to rust, but we think that the NAFTA card is being overplayed by both sides. Here, John McCain is refreshingly candid when he says that eliminating NAFTA won't bring the jobs back.
Amen. They both have to answer for their rotten trade history but they should be spending their time pushing an energy policy that will make NAFTA less painful. That would be an especially good idea in Pennsylvania.
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