Trade on the (Campaign) Trail

Here's what the presidential candidates had to say this week about trade:

Former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), at a Chicago meeting of the Laborers International Union of North America in response to a question about Clinton's healthcare plan, reported by the Chicago Tribune, said:

"The cost of that failure 14 years ago is not just somebody's political fortune or their scars," he said. "It's the millions of Americans who have now gone for almost 15 years without health care."

"We didn't get universal health care, but we got [the North American Free Trade Agreement]," he said. "We need universal health care. We didn't need NAFTA."

"I'd make sure that jobs aren't exported to countries without protection from child or slave labor…And I'd make sure there are job protections and environmental protections" so that the United States won't be at a disadvantage.

"The president will tell you Wall Street's doing great. Tell that to the family in Newton, Iowa, which lost 2,700 jobs when Maytag got gobbled up by Whirlpool," he said. "The American dream has suffered because our economy is only responding to the upper branch of the population."

The National Review reports in its column Democrats Panic In The Heartland that Edwards' consultant, Dave "Mudcat" Sanders, had some impassioned words about Clinton and NAFTA:

If the Clintons had gone to the mat for universal health care the way they did for NAFTA and for crazy one-sided trade treaties, and had listened about the giant sucking sound that Ross Perot told them about, we would still have our health care and our jobs. It takes gall for her to say she's going to help us. She's got a record of killing us….

When Hillary Clinton talks about the 'unintended consequences' of NAFTA -- hey, I was born at night, but wasn't born last night. Unintended consequences, my ass. Everybody in rural and small town America knows they were unconsidered consequences. They didn't give a s---. All they cared about was holding on to their power!