Robert Reich visited Oberlin College about a month too late. It would have nice if Bill Clinton's secretary of labor had been here before the Ohio primary, when his party's leading presidential candidates were busy bashing trade in general and the North American Free Trade Agreement in particular.
Reich, now a professor of public policy at the University of California, told an audience in Finney Chapel that protectionism is a familiar response to economic hard times, but that it is almost always the wrong one. He noted that manufacturing employment in Ohio actually grew after NAFTA's ratification. The numbers have declined since the recession that hit in 2000, but that was almost surely driven more by technological advances than foreign competition.
http://www.cleveland.com/editorials/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/opinion/...
Also see:
http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2008/02/hillary-and-barack-afta-nafta.html
Yeah, they really "took her on". You had to scan to the end of the article to see her name...mentioned once.