Pushing the dems on trade.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Political Eye - Column

Somewhere between Pennsylvania, Ohio, and the Upper Midwest, Hillary Clinton morphed into Hugo Chavez.

"I believe that trade agreements must elevate standards of living around the world and not empower corporations to hold those standards down," Clinton declared in Ohio.

Or, as Chavez put it, "We must confront the privileged elite who have destroyed a large part of the world."

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Like Chávez--the president of Venezuela who called the president of Mexico a "lapdog of the empire" for supporting trade deals like NAFTA and the FTAA--Clinton now says such deals are undemocratic, and are enriching corporate honchos at the expense of ordinary citizens here and abroad.

"As part of my plan to fix NAFTA, I have called for revising the provisions that permit foreign companies to challenge U.S. laws," Clinton said. She slammed corporations' ability, under NAFTA, to overturn "regulations intended to protect workers and protect the environment."

That's quite a switcheroo for Hillary, who, despite her protestations to the contrary, advocated for NAFTA's passage in her husband's Administration, according to records of her meetings as First Lady.

Clinton's turnaround is a sign of how much the winds have shifted on the issue of trade.

Not to be outdone, Barack Obama has been attacking NAFTA with increasing vehemence. "During the NAFTA era, we have seen one out of every four U.S. manufacturing jobs destroyed and real wages decline," he told trade activists in Wisconsin. He denounced NAFTA's "special protections that eliminate the risks of moving to low-wage countries," and "attacks on our domestic environmental, health, and safety laws upon which communities rely."

Both Clinton and Obama have promised to renegotiate NAFTA. Both have taken increasingly progressive stances on other trade deals, shifting from what one activist calls "ten years of bipartisan, D.C. orthodoxy" that led them to support an agreement with Peru (though neither showed up to vote for it) to opposing recent deals with South Korea, Panama, and Colombia.

"You have two candidates who have come so far that if someone had predicted this stance one year ago, people would have called you crazy," says Andy Gussert, national director of the Citizens Trade Campaign, an umbrella organization of state activists from environmental, labor, and interfaith groups that care about trade.

Gussert and his colleagues see the tight race between Hillary and Obama, particularly in states...