US President Barack Obama made an intense effort to lobby fellow Democrats to support him on trade. They repudiated him nearly unanimously.
Every Democratic senator except one, Tom Carper, voted against moving forward on legislation on Tuesday to award Obama “fast track” authority to negotiate trade deals that can pass US Congress without being amended. The vote failed 52-45, falling eight short of the 60 votes needed and dealing a stinging setback to the centerpiece of Obama’s second-term economic agenda, his hopes for a landmark Trans-Pacific Partnership pact.
Although the White House and senators of both parties are already working to revive the legislation, the outcome stunned the Capitol and highlighted Democratic divisions on trade heading into a presidential election year with control of the US Senate at stake. Obama says it is essential for US goods and services to have easier access to other countries in a globalizing economy, while many Democrats and the labor unions that back them still feel the pain of job losses they blame on earlier trade deals and fear more could be yet to come.
Tuesday’s vote also laid bare the strained relations between Obama and Democrats on Capitol Hill, who have spent years complaining of neglect by a president who tends grudgingly, if at all, to the relationship-building aspects of politics.
The president’s tough sell on the trade legislation included White House meetings, flights on Air Force One, promises of political support and concerted outreach by officials from US Vice President Joe Biden on down.
Obama mounted a public relations campaign to exert pressure, attacking his Democratic opponents as “wrong” in interviews and speeches, and even directly engaging liberal standard-bearer US Senator Elizabeth Warren, dismissing her over the weekend as “a politician like everybody else.”
None of it worked, and for a president grasping for a final legacy achievement in the waning years of his administration, with the US Congress fully controlled by the opposition party, his inability to gather more than a sole Democratic supporter to move forward in the Senate stood as an embarrassing rebuke.
“It is the president’s party,” Republican US Senator Orrin Hatch said. “It’s amazing to me that they would do this to the president on a bill of this magnitude.”
The White House downplayed the turmoil.
“It is not unprecedented, to say the least, for the United States Senate to encounter procedural snafus,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said ahead of the vote. “I would urge you to withhold judgement about the president’s persuasion ability until we’ve had an opportunity to try to advance this piece of legislation through the Senate.”
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