In Shift, Obama Doesn’t Plan to Reopen Nafta Talks

The Obama administration said on Monday that it has no plans for reopening negotiations on the North American Free Trade Agreement to revise its labor and environmental provisions, as then-Senator Barack Obama promised to do during his presidential campaign.

“The president has said we will look at all of our options, but I think they can be addressed without having to reopen the agreement,” said Ronald Kirk, the United States trade representative.

Mr. Kirk spoke in a conference call with reporters after returning from the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad over the weekend. He said President Obama conferred there with the leaders of Mexico and Canada — the other parties to the free trade agreement — and “they are all of the mind we should look for opportunities to strengthen Nafta.”

Though a formal review of the pact has yet to be completed, Mr. Kirk noted, both Mr. Obama and President Felipe Calderon of Mexico have said that “they don’t believe we have to reopen the agreement now.”

In particular, Mexico, which has seen its exports grow hugely since the agreement was ratified in 1992, has little interest in such a renegotiation.

Mr. Obama was not the only candidate for president who promised during the campaign to renegotiate the accord, a politically popular position in some electorally important Midwestern states that have lost thousands of manufacturing jobs. His chief Democratic rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is now secretary of state, did so as well.

Mr. Kirk, the former mayor of Dallas, who is known as a strong free-trade advocate, said that the administration also planned rapid reviews of pending free trade agreements with Colombia and Panama.

“The president has said we will look at all of our options, but I think they can be addressed without having to reopen the agreement,” said Ronald Kirk, the United States trade representative.

Notice that this totally meaningless string of words was written up by The New York Times as if Mr. Kirk had actually said something. We will "look at all of our options." Of course we will. Everyone does that. It's a motherhood.

Next we are going to "address our options." How exactly does one do that? What does it even mean to "address" an option? Which of our various options are going to be addressed? One? Two? All of them? Since the default option is always "do nothing," it is obvious that we can "address" it without reopening the agreement. This guy just said nothing, and The New York Times thinks it's news.

Saying nothing in polysyllabic tergiversation is a hallmark of the Obama Administration. Did anybody hear Lawrence Summers on Meet the Press? He had to have been prepped with this answer, because the question was about Cuba and Summers is not really involved with foreign policy. The Administration spinmeisters basically stuffed his head with this gibberish:

You know, what the president announced this week is what he's been talking about for two years. It's a set of measures that are grounded in American interests, that are grounded in morality, letting families get back together, together again. Cuba's known what it needs to do for a very long time and it's up to them in terms of their policies, their democratization, all of the steps that they can take. And we'll have to see what happens down the road.

In other words, he wanted to get "Cuba" and "democratization" in the same sentence with "morality" and "families" as if the Obama Administration was going to do something about these things. But they're not. They're not doing anything. "It's up to Cuba" to change their policies. We'll have to "wait and see" what they do. The Obama Administration put this guy on television to mouth pretty words while saying absolutely nothing.

Just as Mr. Kirk did above.

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