Clinton, who backed the developing trade pact when she was secretary of state during Obama’s first term, said she was anxious the agreement would not do enough to crack down on currency manipulation or protect consumers from excessively high drug prices.
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A potential exception is Vice President Joe Biden, who has yet to say whether he will join the race.
In an announcement, Mrs. Clinton said she was all the while considering the subtle elements of the settlement – the biggest territorial exchange bargain in history and went for uniting countries speaking to two-fifths of the worldwide economy.
In fact, it is interesting to observe how Hillary Clinton the presidential candidate is diverging in her view about the TPP from the one she held as Hillary Clinton the Secretary of State. The anecdotal accounts of those sector losses have driven opposition to trade deals among unions and many Democrats.
Then she stepped from the White House and into 2016 presidential politics and struck a more reserved and slightly skeptical tone, withholding a clear opinion on the deal.
“I am pleased the passage of TPA earlier this year will allow the public to fully review the text of TPP, and I look forward to receiving input from my constituents and other stakeholders”, Tiberi said. “We made improvements. Now, looking back on it, it doesn’t have the results we thought it would have”.
Her apparent change of heart over TPP, which she once described as the “gold standard” of modern free-trade deals, follows reservations expressed by many Democrat politicians, including rivals for the party’s presidential candidacy.
September 8, 2010, remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations: “We want to realize the benefits from greater economic integration”.
“Based on what I know so far, I can’t support this agreement”, Clinton said in a statement.
“So it’s fair to say that our economies are entwined, and we need to keep upping our game both bilaterally and with partners across the region through agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership or TPP”.
The signing of the TPP could be good for China because the 12 member nations have disclosed their bottom line during the TPP negotiations and this would help China to accelerate talks for bilateral pacts with these countries, Zhang said.
In the interview, Clinton said the agreement does not meet her standard for creating jobs, raising wages and protecting national security.
Advisers feared that if she called the vote a mistake, she’d be tagged a “flip-flopper”, a charge that devastated Democratic nominee John Kerry in 2004. The most hopeful thing to be said about this deeply disappointing abandonment of the president she served, and the internationalist tendency in Democratic ideology she once embodied, is that it is so transparently political. The TPP deal will benefit only pharmaceutical companies at the cost of patients.
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Politically motivated or not, Clinton’s move is certainly adding steam to her campaign following her appearance Saturday on SNL. Several months ago, I asked a Sanders press aide to name the major issues on which his candidate and Clinton disagreed – the Keystone pipeline and free trade were prominently mentioned.
