Look for Hillary Clinton to downplay or deny her very central role in a global trade deal that has split the Democratic Party, because admitting to it would threaten her White House ambitions, political strategist Dick Morris told
Newsmax TV on Wednesday.
"She has a huge problem with this," Morris told "Newsmax Now" co-host John Bachman, meaning the massive Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) treaty that Senate Democrats refused to consider on Tuesday in a stunning rebuke to their party's leader, President Barack Obama.
"As always, lying will solve it for her," said former Clinton White House adviser Morris. "But [it's] a huge problem — which is that she wrote the damn treaty."
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"I mean she was in charge of the State Department while they were negotiating," said Morris, "and for her now to oppose it — which the unions and labor are demanding of her — is going to make it very difficult for her."
A longtime Wall Street ally who is now trying on the mantle of
Main Street populist, Clinton has yet to say publicly if Congress should grant the president authority to finalize a deal, or if she will side with vocal TPP critics like Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.
Warren and others have denounced the pact as a gift to corporations at the expense of workers, and on Tuesday nearly every other Senate Democrat joined her
in blocking the treaty from a floor debate.
In the current political climate, merely voicing concerns about TPP, as Clinton has done, is not going to cut it — "particularly not with [organized] labor going crazy over this issue," said Morris.
"This issue has percolated now deeply enough so that Americans really get it and really understand it," he said, arguing that at heart TPP is not a discussion about trade.
"This is a discussion over income inequality," he said.
And the one winning the argument is Warren, said Morris.
Morris also discussed
a new Pew poll that shows a sharp decline in Christianity in the United States and a surge in the number of self-described agnostics.
"It reverses the trend that we've had," he said. "We had a very positive trend going on in the United States in the '80s and the '90s and into the first years of this decade where increasing number of people went to church or synagogue once a week or more," he said.
The new trend away from religiosity poses a challenge — but not an insurmountable one — to presidential candidates who poll strongly among evangelicals and will have to appeal more broadly, said Morris.
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