Reply #18: Hillary lied about NAFTA and health care today

[ProSense]

According to news reports, the Clinton campaign lashed out at the use of the mailer in a conference call with selected reporters, complaining that the mail piece bears a resemblance to the "Harry and Louise" TV spots of 1993 and 1994 (pictured here).

One person on the call emotionally said the Obama mail piece was "outrageous as having Nazis march through Skokie, Illinois." That outburst was quickly disavowed during the call by Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson, who said it is "not a comparison that (the campaign) would make." The unpaid health care adviser who made the remark, Len Nichols of the New America Foundation, later apologized. He sent an e-mail to reporters saying, "My passions overwhelmed me. I chose an analogy that was wholly inappropriate."

We agree that there is a resemblance between the photo on the Obama mailer and the TV spots. In those ads actors portraying a white, middle-class couple expressed grave concerns about how the Clinton administration's health care plan would affect them. The ads were part of a $17 million campaign by the insurance industry that was widely credited – rightly or wrongly – with contributing to the defeat of the Clinton plan, and the ads still anger many advocates of broader government efforts to provide health insurance. But so far as we can see, Obama's choice of images in his mailer has nothing whatever to do with the accuracy of the claims it makes, or the accuracy of what "Harry and Louise" said, for that matter.

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Did she mention the "Nazis" comment?

The NYT just reported the source of the misleading claim, Newday, issued a response:

(Reporters from Newsday responded on its Web site last week, but stopped short of a correction. “The word was our characterization of how we best understood her position on NAFTA, based on a review of past stories and her public statements,” they wrote, adding that the Obama mailer made the word ‘boon” appear to be Mrs. Clinton’s statement. “Obama’s use of the citation in this way does strike us as misleading,” they wrote.)

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Here is what they said

The Democratic campaign has moved in earnest to Ohio, where times are tough and NAFTA has become a dirty word. In an effort to score points, Barack Obama has been dropping a mail-piece (left) that repeats a charge he has made several other times during the campaign -- that "Hillary Clinton believed NAFTA was 'a boon' to the economy."

This attack has attracted a flurry of attention, from Clinton's campaign and some reporters. As it turns out, the primary source is us. Back in Sept. 2006, an abbreviated chart printed on Newsday's Spin Cycle page compared Hillary with her Democratic US Senate primary challenger Jonathan Tasini on a variety of issues. The issues chart included this:

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Obama's use of the citation in this way does strike us as misleading. The quote marks make it look as if Hillary said "boon," not us. It's an example of the kind of slim reeds campaigns use to try to win an office.

That said, we should have been clearer.

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Here is information about the Peru bill.

Obama never said he was against trade. NAFTA was a horrible bill, which Bill Clinton signed into law and Hillary has defended.