Obama is using a rhetorical device we're used to hearing, but not used to reading. If we recorded his words as poetry, they'd look something like this:

I believe in trade,

and I won't stand here

and here

and tell you

I won't stop every job from disappearing

because of globalization.

So, we're still gonna lose jobs, even if we vote for the audacity of hope.

Shades of accusing Obama of being anti-choice in New Hampshire (later exposed as a deliberate Clinton lie).

Now, we are supposed to be excited about an Obama advisor who repeated the Obama position on NAFTA (that it needs to be fixed, not scrapped entirely), and got reported as Obama saying one thing in public and another in private.

So Goolsbee denies ever saying the Obama campaign plans to keep NAFTA as is (true) and denies going to a meeting where he said that Obama has a public position as a trade protectionist (also true).

Now that is being spun as a denial that he ever went to any meetings where trade was ever talked about (ridiculous).

And the oppo dump comes 24 hours before the Ohio primary (predictable, and stinks MarK Penn and Clinton negative campainging).

What a surprise. The picture of Obama wearing a turban on a trip to Africa was more interesting.

Leave it to Salon to make this a moot issue.

While I do not profess to speak for all Canadians, there are plenty of us who would love to see NAFTA torn up or at least re-negotiated.

Under the current arrangement, we are not permitted to restrict the export of oil to the USA, even if it is for our own use. We are the energy security plan for the US. We are actually the largest supplier of energy to your country.

America also ripped us off for $5B in illegal softwood limber tariffs. We sued under NAFTA and won, but we were told that we should negotiate with you about how much of our money you should have to return.

These trade agreements are much more beneficial to you than they are to your trading partners. If they weren't you would never have entered into them in the first place.

The outsourcing of your jobs is not caused by foreign countries, it is brought about by American companies looking for cheap labour and higher profits.

Here's some numbers that finally revealed what has been going on. They raise the question, why are MNC's dominating our government, when they are dumping American workers? What is our national interest? If the trade off for Americans is our good jobs for cheap goods from China, who among us would vote for it? And then, as this is a democracy, why are we going in this direction? From the latest BusinessWeek:

Figures collected by the Bureau of Economic Analysis suggest the multinational sector has in some ways been a drag on the U.S. economy since 2000. From 2000 to 2005, the last year for which full data are available, U.S. multinationals cut more than 2 million jobs at home, even as employment in the rest of the private sector grew—and there’s no sign the trend has significantly reversed. The U.S. operations of foreign multinationals also shrank over the five-year stretch, dropping 500,000 jobs as foreign investors cut costs and sold off U.S. companies. Toyota, perhaps the most successful foreign company in the U.S., added all of 9,000 jobs in the states between 2000 and 2007.

It's worth noting that MCS's added more to their overseas employee head count then they cut in the USA, so there is job growth, but at the expense of American workers.

Dropping or making major changes to NAFTA might be difficult, but Obama also supports Bush's SPP (spp.gov), aka "NAFTA on steroids". Why continue a plan that, unlike NAFTA, isn't yet integrated into our system? Why continue something that, at this point in time, is completely optional and something that Obama could easily oppose?

Not only that, when he came out in support of Bush's plan, he spoke in code, not referencing Bush's plan by name but using it's catchphrases and referencing the SPP meetings.

Details at my name's link.

The controversy over NAFTA is stupid and just proves that people who lose jobs to trade are, for the most part, simply unwilling to adapt to the demands of a changing economy. Instead of yearning for the jobs of yester-year they should be clamoring for a strong support system to assist those who suffer trade-related job loss with education and retraining programs to help them rejoin a workforce. The part that transfers the unneccesary Farm Bill largesse into trade job-loss assistance will stay in power for a generation.

But Workers who have lost their jobs to trade hate change like trade liberals hate America - and ultimately they will both denounce and reject Obama's message of change. They subscribe to the platonic ideal of the arrested state of social affairs, a state of mind where all change is only the decay of a truer form of society (an egalitarian Sparta of union jobs and benefits). However, the reality is that they themselves helped drive the change by taking their patronage from main street to wal-mart in search of the cheapest prices and a better quality of life; looking forward to a secure retirement, they held stakes in union pensions and 401(k)s heavily invested in the same mutlinationals that employed them. They too clamored for the best returns. They too were part of the quarterly chorus for cut costs and higher returns. Does this make such workers responsible for hastening their own jobs overseas? Their proposed solution to their dilema - to bring the jobs back - is no solution at all. Are they willing to work for developing country wages and no benefits besides, perhaps, dormitory housing?

So why do politicians pander to this tragic chorus? Because their eternal dirge is an order of magnitude louder than the satisfaction of those many millions sitting in quiet enjoyment of their improved prospects because of trade. To not address them is to look uncaringly upon their plight. Yes, Obama's populist grandstanding has been the low-point of his primary campaign, but outside his rhetoric every other indicator shows a common sense approach to trade. Yes, trade makes some losers on the individual level, but it only makes winners by agregate measures. In america there is, however, no excuse for losers to be losers permanently, besides their own arrested state of mind.