Hillary Clinton announces opposition to Pacific trade pact

Fredreka Schouten

Democratic presidential candidateHillary Clinton said Wednesday she opposes a trade agreement between the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries, putting her in sharp opposition with President Obama.

"I am not in favor of what I have learned about it," Clinton said in an interview on PBS's News Hour.

"I have said from the very beginning that we have to have a trade agreement that would create good American jobs, raise wages and advance our national security, and I still believe that is the high bar we have to meet," she said. Clinton added that she doesn't believe the agreement "is going to meet the high bar I have set."

The Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Obama hopes to make one of the defining legacies of his presidency, is sharply opposed by labor unions. White House officials, speaking on condition they not be named, said Clinton's aides alerted them about her opposition before she went public.

Clinton's move is a sharp reversal from her support for the deal as Obama's first secretary of State and is the latest step she has taken toward progressives in her party. Her remarks come as Vice President Biden weighs entering the contest.

Biden's office quickly issued a one-sentence statement as news of Clinton's opposition spread through Washington. "The Vice President supports the TPP agreement and will help pass it on the Hill," it read.

In announcing the deal this week, Obama said the agreement will eliminate or reduce foreign tariffs on each nation's products, easing trade in a zone that stretches from Canada to Chile to Australia and Japan.

For the United States, it means the elimination of what amounts to foreign taxes on some 18,000 U.S. products.

"So we are knocking down barriers that are currently preventing American businesses from selling in these countries and are preventing American workers from benefitting from those sales to the fastest-growing, most dynamic region in the world." Obama said on Tuesday.

Clinton had backed the deal, known as TPP, when she served in the Obama administration. "This TPP sets the gold standard in trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade, the kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field," Clinton said during a visit to Australia in 2012.

Her critics immediately seized on the move as politically calculated.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement that "Clinton's painful waffling on TPP has been a case study in political expediency and is precisely why an overwhelming majority of Americans don’t trust her.

Jeff Bechdel, a spokesman for American Rising PAC, a group opposed to Clinton's candidacy, said her "ability to shift positions based on political survival is both astonishing and deeply disturbing." He said the group had tallied 45 instances of Clinton pushing the trade deal.

Progressive hailed her decision and urged Democrats on Capitol Hill to join her in bucking the president.

“If Hillary Clinton, who worked on the Trans-Pacific Partnership as secretary of State, can change her mind about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, so can the small number of Democrats in Congress who have previously voiced their support," said Murshed Zaheed, deputy political director of CREDO, one of the groups working to kill the pact.