It turns out that that flap about an Obama advisor privately assuring a Canadian diplomat that the candidate's anti-NAFTA rhetoric was all for show is a little more complicated than first thought. When a Canadian television network first reported it, both the Obama campaign and the Canadian embassy denied – vehemently – that a meeting had occurred.
Except the Associated Press has now obtained notes taken by a diplomat taken at the meeting. And the notes appear to back up the contention that the Obama staffer did assure the Canadians that Obama didn't really mean what he was saying to voters.
SAN ANTONIO – Barack Obama's senior economic policy adviser said Sunday that Canadian government officials wrote an inaccurate portrayal of his private discussion on the campaign's trade policy in a memo obtained by The Associated Press.
The memo is the first documentation to emerge publicly out of the meeting between the adviser, Austan Goolsbee, and officials with the Canadian consulate in Chicago, but Goolsbee said it misinterprets what he told them. The memo was written by Joseph DeMora, who works for the consulate and attended the meeting.
Goolsbee disputed a section that read: "Noting anxiety among many U.S. domestic audiences about the U.S. economic outlook, Goolsbee candidly acknowledged the protectionist sentiment that has emerged, particularly in the Midwest, during the primary campaign. He cautioned that this messaging should not be taken out of context and should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans."
"This thing about `it's more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans,' that's this guy's language," Goolsbee said of DeMora. "He's not quoting me.
"I certainly did not use that phrase in any way," Goolsbee said.
The meeting was first reported last week by Canadian television network CTV, which cited unnamed sources as saying that Goolsbee assured the Canadians that Obama's tough talk on the North American Free Trade Agreement is just campaign rhetoric not to be taken seriously. The Obama campaign and the Canadian embassy denied there was any inconsistency between what the candidate was saying publicly and what advisers were saying privately.
The normal political ploy: When caught, claim you were misquoted at the meeting you originally claimed never took place. This sort of thing is known as "getting caught."
"I certainly did not use that phrase in any way," Goolsbee said
Gaius, we all have to love how Clintonesque this is. Okay, so instead, Goolsbee used a different phrase that meant , however, the exact same thing.
It is also variously known as the "Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire" defense, or the Pinnochio gambit.
I think you’ve missed a big part of the story: the AP reported this? They’ve gone off the reservation!
See, it all depends upon what your definition of "was" is. So when they say "I was never at that meeting!" it, of course, means "I WAS at that meeting,"
And remember, Obama and Co., are WAY different than Clinton and Co.
I don’t see the getting caught here. Clinton claimed Goolsbee met with the Canadian ambassador and said things he didn’t say. Goolsbee didn’t meet with the Canadian ambassador, so he denied it and told reporters to speak to Obama’s press shop. It now emerges that Goolsbee met with the Canadian Consulate that is down the street and took a short unofficial Q&A on NAFTA as a short part of a 40 minute tour/meeting. And a Canadian aide’s transcription of the event doesn’t fit with Goolsbee’s recollection. It seems plausible to me that if someone accused you of making a secret side-deal with the Canadian ambassador, a high-level official, your first reaction wouldn’t be to recall the two minutes you spent while touring the Canadian consulate meeting with low-level officials that concerned NAFTA in general, especially if you didn’t make any secret side-deal with this meeting. It seems that Goolsbee honestly didn’t know what Clinton was talking about, because the accusation and the reality were so far apart. The question is whether the Canadian government is trying to pick a winner because pro-Clinton forces are still in the Canadian civil service, or whether the low-level aide who wrote the memo was simly mistaken. But the idea that Goolsbee was purposely lying and that this was a super-secret meeting about a side-deal with the Canadian ambassador seems rather bogus, even according to the Clintons’ own timeline of the event. if this is game-changing, it’s rather sad.
The fact that one of Obama’s staffers effectively told the Canadians that Obama is LIEING to the public on a daily basis for political gain will be a one day story in the MSM and probably won’t even make it into the TV news broadcasts. Why? Because Sam Wah is right – they are WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY off the reservation releasing this story at all. The rest of the MSM won’t compound the mistake by adding fuel to the fire.