Well, this free-trade issue is big. Among the presidency-seeking former residents of our state, it finds Hillary Clinton evading per usual, and Mike Huckabee going scatological per usual.
The Obama administration wants to enter into the biggest trade agreement ever, much bigger than NAFTA.
It's the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, with 12 Pacific Rim nations. The president says the deal would pull those nations from China's orbit, grow the riches of the global economy for all Americans, and contain better labor and environmental concessions from our new international partners than previous trade agreements.
Republicans generally favor it because it advances big business. That's excepting the scatological and purportedly populist Huckster.
Meanwhile, liberal Democrats--which Hillary Clinton is trying sort of to be for purposes of the current political dynamic--are against it because these trade deals always seem to create jobs for other countries and hurt middle-class workers in the United States.
Let's start with Hillary's predicament, which is complicated by the men in her life--as ever--and by the nature of Democratic politics currently.
Her husband, Bill Clinton, was a pioneering free-trade "new Democrat" who made NAFTA--the North American Free Trade Agreement--one of his signature achievements. As secretary of state for Barack Obama, Hillary said nice things about the TPP that her boss was pushing, calling it "the gold standard in trade agreements."
In her book, Hard Choices, aptly named for the current predicament, Hillary lauded the percolating deal for "lowering trade barriers while raising standards on labor, the environment and intellectual property."
But now Hillary needs to sidle over to the Democratic Party's modern pro-working-class progressivism led by U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who calls the TPP another sop to billionaires and another affront to the American middle class.
And Hillary needs to concern herself only a bit with her socialist Democrat announced opponent for the nomination, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who assails her for favoring and/or evading the trade agreement and staying in bed with billionaires.
So what does Hillary say lately on the issue?
Get a load of this stated position from her campaign last month: "She will be watching closely to see what is being done to crack down on currency manipulation, improve labor rights, protect the environment and health, promote transparency and open new opportunities for our small businesses to export overseas."
Allow me to share a more candid view from her campaign chairman, John Podesta, who was overheard at a fundraiser saying of the TPP: "Can you make it go away?"
Hillary's history with trade agreements is one of flips and flops according to her association or need at the time.
She was pro-NAFTA as Bill's first lady, but critical of NAFTA as a candidate for the U.S. Senate in New York.
She was pro-worker running against Obama in the Pennsylvania primary in 2008, then pro-trade when employed as Obama's secretary of state.
So her real position on the TPP is actually simple: She wants to be president.
For Huckabee's part, he wants to be the American evangelical pope and to carve out a niche as the pro-working-man populist in the otherwise Koch-addicted, Club for Growth-addicted Republican Party.
So he, alone among Republican candidates, seems to ally with the socialist Democrat Sanders.
While Hillary was "watching closely," Huckabee was getting altogether graphic last week.
He told NBC: "When there's cronies involved and getting a special deal, and when other countries are cheating and Americans lose jobs, I'd like to think the U.S. government would stand up for the U.S. workers rather than let them take it in the backside."
The comment led national political reporter Jonathan Martin of the New York Times to ask me on Twitter why Huckabee so frequently invokes the scatological metaphor. My credential for answering, apparently, is that, long ago, Huckabee responded to one of my columns by saying I must have been constipated the day I wrote it.
My best explanation is that Huckabee is so confident in his glibness--since it is that glibness that has made him who he is--that he trusts too much his spontaneous imagery and takes insufficient care to self-edit.
Anyway, he figures he can talk his way out of tomorrow whatever jam he talks himself into today.
And he's crude. There's that.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 05/12/2015