Last night on Olberman it was reported that the story out of Canada about their parliament being told not to worry about the rhetoric on the campaign trail with regard to NAFTA has a new twist.

Turns out that it was the Clinton Campaign that was telling the Canadian Parliament not to worry about their rhetoric. They were the ones trying to assure Canada that nothing would change with regard to NAFTA. It was NOT Barack Obama's campaign.

Shouldn't this be HUGE news? Arguably the innuendo that somehow Barack's campaign was contacting Canada behind the scenes with regard to NAFTA cost him the Ohio election. You would think this news would also sink Hillary's chances in Pennsylvanaia.

But instead the BIG news today is that an Obama campaign manager called Hillary a monster. The Clinton camp ofcourse feigned shock and outrage demanding that she be fired. The campaign manager, Samantha Powers, has since resigned.

Hillary has managed to dodge the Canada NAFTA bullet today by once again playing the victim card.

Democratic Underground:

Then, on Feb 27, the Canadian network CTV reported that even as Obama was publicly attacking Bill's role in NAFTA, and arguing for a drastic overhaul, he'd had key economic advisor Austin Goolsby arrange a meeting with the Canadian ambassador where Goolsby reassured them that this was all just "political positioning," pandering for campaign trail. The likely source of the anonymous Valerie Plame-style leak was right-wing Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Chief of Staff, Ian Brodie, and US media jumped all over it as proof of Obama's hypocrisy. The Canadian embassy denied the story and Obama also said it was false.

A follow-up March 3d leak then sent a supposed memo summarizing the meeting to the major US media outlets, quoting Goolsby as saying Obama's statements were more "political positioning than the clear articulation of policy plans." Clinton made the controversy a centerpiece of her home stretch speeches and ads, saying "You come to Ohio and you both give speeches that are very critical of NAFTA and you send out misleading and false information about my position regarding NAFTA and then we find out that your chief economic advisor has gone to a foreign government and basically done the old wink wink, don't pay any attention this is just political rhetoric."

She even ran a radio ad that misleadingly presenting itself as a news story, which concluded, "As Senator Obama was telling one story to Ohio, his campaign was telling a very different story to Canada."
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But as the CBC report and others makes clear, the core of the story turned out to be false. The Canadian government contacted Goolsby to clarify Obama's position on trade, not the reverse. Although Goolsby did meet with Canada's Chicago consul general George Rioux (not, as was reported in the original leak, Ambassador Michael Wilson), there's no evidence that he ever described Obama's position as mere political posturing. Instead, Goolsby responded to Canadian questions by clarifying that Obama wasn't pushing to scrap the agreement entirely, but that labor and environmental safeguards were important to him.

The memo was simply inaccurate, as even the Harper government now acknowledges after a firestorm of criticism by opposition parliament members, who've accused the Harper government of trying to help their Republican allies across the border by trying to take down the likely and stronger of the Democratic candidates. In response, Harper called the leak "blatantly unfair," pledged to get to the bottom of it, and said "there was no intention to convey, in any way, that Senator Obama and his campaign team were taking a different position in public from views expressed in private, including about NAFTA."

Ironically, the day before the story hit American TV, Brodie, told reporters questioning him on trade that "someone from (Hillary) Clinton's campaign is telling the embassy to take it with a grain of salt. . .That someone called us and told us not to worry." But that never made the headlines and no one raised it in the campaign.

As Matt Wallace writes in the Daily Kos, "this scandal was manufactured out of whole cloth. Goolsbee said something consistent with Obama's official position--that he wanted protections added, but it wasn't going to be a fundamental change or revocation of NAFTA, and that Obama was not a protectionist.

This was morphed somewhat going into the memo, and now the embassy admits they "may have misrepresented the Obama advisor." Even after the memo misrepresented Obama, the Harper government took it a step further and then leaked a completely fantastic version of the story to the press, in order to maximize the bloodletting."

The Harper government has now apologized for any interference in an American political campaign, but the damage is done.

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