Clinton makes desperate move with NAFTA-gate

In a last ditch effort to roll over Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries today, the Clinton campaign pounced on the Illinois senator on an alleged meeting between a Obama campaign advisor and the Canadian consulate last month.

From The Wall Street Journal

The Obama campaign called the issue a "smokescreen" created by the Clinton campaign and Sen. Obama yesterday said that the Canadian consulate, not Mr. Goolsbee, had initiated the meeting. "He went down there as a courtesy and at some point they started talking about trade and Nafta," he said.

The revelations over the meeting and Sen. Clinton's effort to portray Sen. Obama as a political opportunist follow efforts by Sen. Obama to do the same. Last month, his campaign sent mailings to Ohio voters arguing that Sen. Clinton only opposed Nafta once she began running for president. The episode illustrates a bind facing pro-free trade Democrats with voters in the industrial Midwest, where such deals are enormously unpopular. "It's obviously political," says I. M. Destler, a University of Maryland professor of public policy. "Neither one of them has previously shown any great urge to reconfigure or revise Nafta."

Politicians lying to the voters? What else is new…