Progressives: Kaine Selection Gives Trump Advantage on Trade
Progressive leaders are concerned that Hillary Clinton’s selection of Sen. Tim Kaine as her running mate will give Donald Trump and Republicans the advantage on trade this fall.
During his convention speech, Trump courted supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on trade, predicting they “will join our movement, because we will fix his biggest issue: trade.”
Stephanie Taylor, the co-founder of Progressive Change Campaign, said in a statement that “Republicans now have a new opening to attack Democrats on this economic populist issue” since Kaine “voted to fast track the Trans-Pacific Partnership.”
Taylor said, as was evident in Trump’s convention speech, “Republicans will run hard against Democrats on trade this year.”
“Clinton should push the White House to take TPP off the table in a lame duck Congress in order to avoid this vice presidential pick allowing Donald Trump to outflank her on this key issue,” she added.
Clinton reportedly selected Kaine to help her appeal to blue-collar voters, but Trump has appealed to them, like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), by opposing corrupt and unfair globalist trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership that put globalists ahead of Americans.
Kaine, according to Politico, was praising the Trans-Pacific Partnership as of Thursday but, sometime within the next 24 hours, flip-flopped and opposed it, according to a Huffington Post report.
“I am having discussions with a lot of groups around Virginia about the treaty itself. I see much in it to like,” Kaine reportedly said Thursday, according to Politico. “I think it’s an upgrade of labor standards, I think it’s an upgrade of environmental standards. I think it’s an upgrade of intellectual property protections.” But the Huffington Post was informed that “Kaine had told the former secretary of state that he would oppose President Barack Obama’s signature trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, in its current form. The aide said that at some point in Kaine and Clinton’s two conversations prior to the selection ― which she made Friday night, eight days after the first meeting ― he agreed with her that a trade deal had to meet certain criteria on protecting wages and national security, and that the TPP did not.”
Norman Solomon, the national coordinator for the Bernie Delegates Network, told the left-wing Common Dreams that Clinton must know that “her choice of Kaine can only inflame rather than soothe her relations with the huge constituency of Bernie supporters.” He added that progressives will “will understand what it means when their efforts to challenge oligarchy have been met by Clinton’s selection of a loyal servant of oligarchy.”
“If Clinton has reached out to Bernie supporters, it appears that she has done so to stick triangulating thumbs in their eyes,” he said.