Bill Scher is the senior writer at the Campaign for America’s Future, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ” along with the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis.

While Hillary Clinton is probably lying about her newfound opposition to President Barack Obama’s trade deal, that doesn’t tell us much about her character. She is simply doing what every Democratic presidential nominee has done on trade for the past three decades: campaign one way, govern another.

Immediately after Clinton turned against the Trans-Pacific Partnership multinational trade agreement Wednesday, opponents and pundits pinned the flip-flop badge to her pantsuit lapel. A June review of her past 45 pro-TPP statements by CNN.com was quickly re-circulated on social media. But the most cutting reaction was the more-in-sadness-than-in-anger conclusion from Vox’s Ezra Klein that Clinton is being dishonest. “It’s hard to believe that Clinton really opposes the TPP deal,” he sighed. “As someone trying to understand Clinton’s likely governing philosophy, it’s unnerving.”


So far, Democratic voters have proved to be highly tolerant of their leaders merely paying lip service to anti-free trade arguments. Obama’s support of trade deals with Korea, Panama and Colombia did not damage his reelection prospects, and TPP has not bruised Obama’s approval ratings among Democrats. Single-issue trade voters are few. Tally up enough liberal victories on other issues, and most Democratic voters will give you a pass.

But anger about unfair trade deals has risen in the aftermath of North American Free Trade Agreement. If TPP ends up being yet another deal that fails to live up to its promises, the populist sentiment in the Democratic base may finally consume its leadership. If it does, it will be a long time coming.

Hillary Clinton, after all, is hardly the first Democrat to play this game. In the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton tried to walk a fine line between President George H. W. Bush’s firm support for NAFTA, which he negotiated, and independent Ross Perot’s warning of a “giant sucking sound of jobs being pulled out of this country.” In the final presidential debate, he sought to impress both camps: “On balance, it does more good than harm if, if we can get some protection … so that the Mexicans have to follow their own environmental standards, their own labor law standards.”

The following year, Clinton nominally followed through by inking side agreements on labor and environmental protections. But he was advocating for passage before those side agreements were finished, agreements that were eventually derided by NAFTA opponents as lacking enforcement mechanisms.

Clinton’s vice president made these same sort of political calculations. While in office, Al Gore became the leading spokesperson for NAFTA, famously debating Ross Perot on CNN as he defended the deal by comparing it to “the creation of NATO, the Louisiana Purchase [and] the purchase of Alaska.” Gore had borrowed that line from Senator Bill Bradley after receiving his help with debate prep. Six years later, Bradley challenged Gore for the Democratic presidential nomination. The Gore campaign fed the Bradley’s version of the quote to friendly labor leaders, who then used it to publicly trash Bradley as excessively pro-trade despite Gore’s own history with the comparison.

The anti-free trade rhetoric continued into the 2004 primaries, when Sen. John Kerry drew attention from his 1993 vote for NAFTA by railing against “Benedict Arnold” companies, “who take the jobs and money overseas and stick you with the bill,” assuring voters that “we are not going to give [them] one benefit or one reward.” But with the primaries, and the pressure from anti-free trade rival Rep. Dick Gephardt behind him, Kerry clarified his earlier remarks to the Wall Street Journal: “The Benedict Arnold line applied, you know, I called a couple of times to overzealous speechwriters and said, ‘Look that’s not what I’m saying.’ Benedict Arnold does not refer to somebody who in the normal course of business is going to go overseas and take jobs overseas. That happens. I support that.”

As recently as the 2008 primaries, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama accused each other of being pro-NAFTA, taking advantage of the fact that both had a mixed record on trade. Obama pledged at an early debate he would work with Canada and Mexico to “try to amend NAFTA, because I think that we can get labor agreements in that agreement right now.” Now, he is promoting TPP. His former secretary of state, who in the negotiation phase said TPP “sets the gold standard in trade agreements,” is disparaging it.

Why does this keep happening? Why is it that on this particular issue, Democratic leaders are unable to be consistent and transparent?

The cynical answer is money—trade deals do mean big bucks for corporate interests. Ralph Nader lambastes “King Obama” and his “royal court” of “massive corporate lobbies” for engineering the “fast-track” legislative process designed to smooth passage of TPP.

Obama’s response to such charges is blunt. Asked about Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s charge that the TPP would undo his Wall Street reforms, Obama shot back, “The notion that I had this massive fight with Wall Street to make sure that we don’t repeat what happened in 2007, 2008. And then I sign a provision that would unravel it? I’d have to be pretty stupid. And it doesn’t make any sense.”

It doesn’t make sense. Over the course of his presidency, Obama has enacted stiffer environmental regulations, souped up the National Labor Relations Board allowing it to impose tougher labor rules, and jacked up taxes on the wealthy. Plus, he never has to run for reelection again. It doesn’t follow that he is following the money.

More plausibly, there is an honest divide in worldview between Democratic leaders and Democratic voters when it comes to trade.

Some of the discord stems from an evergreen tension between idealists resistant to compromises and pragmatists comfortable with incremental progress. Obama argues that the TPP has the labor and environmental protections to make it not only the “most progressive, high-standard trade deal ever crafted,” but also better than the alternative: “If we don’t set [the standards], then China will set them.” But AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka scoffs: “Comparing this pact to previous agreements sets a pretty low bar.”

Some of it involves a difference in perspective. While past trade agreements have contributed to a loss of American manufacturing jobs, they also have helped reduce extreme poverty globally. That is not to say opponents are strictly provincial in their outlook; they can rightly point to the rise of global sweatshops. Still, the pragmatist camp sees the arrow pointing in the right direction, down.

And some of it is a difference of priorities. The push for TPP is not just economic, but geo-strategic, helping to strengthen American influence in Asia relative to China’s.

But these pro-TPP arguments—incremental progress, foreign policy benefits—mean little to rank-and-file Democratic voters, whose antipathy for trade deals has deepened since the early 1990s. The NAFTA case was oversold, and economic inequality has continued to widen. Making the nuanced case for trade agreements is even harder for Democrats than it was 23 years ago, and Democratic candidates are increasingly loath to make them.

Does that make them flip-floppers? Not quite. Obama in fact did re-negotiate NAFTA as he promised in the campaign; TPP includes Canada and Mexico and will supersede the old pact.

The always-careful Hillary Clinton made sure to include in her memoir “Hard Choices” that while she was optimistic about TPP, “it makes sense to reserve judgment until we can evaluate the final proposed agreement.” She also said in the book that “currency manipulation” should be part of the deal, and now she is pointing to the lack of enforceable currency provisions as a reason to oppose. You may understandably think, like Ezra Klein, that she’s not being honest. But you can’t prove it.

If it’s unfair to call them outright flip-floppers, it is indisputable that Democratic candidates partial to new trade agreements are reluctant to lay all their cards on the table during campaigns. Can Democrats keep getting away with it?

Much depends on how TPP is perceived, if it gets ratified, a few years after being implemented. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman two years ago called attention to an economic projection concluding TPP would only boost American GDP by 0.1 percent over 10 years — in other words, no real impact, good or bad. But TPP may get the blame, or the credit, for however the economy is doing down the road. Whether the deal actually will deserve it is another matter.