And anything Harper is saying right now is pretty meaningless. Whatever anyone said to them, I would expect the Canadian government to publicly deny everything.

Obama’s advisor almost certainly said what he is said to have, well, said. Clinton’s campaign may or may not have, though I personally believe that Clinton’s full of it on NAFTA, based on her record. (I would love to believe otherwise, believe me.)

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton never gave Canada any secret assurances about the future of NAFTA such as those allegedly offered by Barack Obama’s campaign, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office said Friday.
With the NAFTA affair swirling over the U.S. election and Canadian officials skittish about saying anything else that might influence the race, it took the PMO two days to deliver the information.

After being asked whether Canadian officials asked for — or received — any briefings from a Clinton campaign representative outlining her plans on NAFTA, a spokeswoman for the prime minister offered a response Friday.

“The answer is no, they did not,” said Harper spokeswoman Sandra Buckler.

That response will come as a relief to the Clinton campaign, which has angrily denied that it has engaged in the kind of double-talking hypocrisy of which it accuses Mr. Obama.
–David Kurtz

And Harper NOW says (after OHIO, of course) that the assertions that Goolsby made such statements mischaracterizes the conversation and that Obama’s public positions were the same as his private ones. But he has never rescinded the statements his Chief-of-Staff made about the Clinton campaigns position. Which is oddly curious?”

And the Clinton campaign has apparently used this story to attack Obama’s integrity. I think it was on Keith’s show that I heard the Obama campaign is looking at this story very carefully. But what worries me is that they don’t want to push back on the story. They want to attack Clinton’s positions on Nafta. I think their not pushing back is a mistake.

What did you think?

None of which is to say I approve of this interference. I very much don’t, both on moral and pragmatic grounds. But you may rest assured that over the last fifty years the US has interfered in our politics far more than the other way around. It isn’t even close.

My judgement is that they both probably reassured Canada. But in terms of actual evidence the evidence against Obama’s campaign is much much more convincing.