On Thursday, March 19, the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and the National Archives opened 11,046 pages of Hillary Clinton’s White House schedules from 1993 to 1998. Given the current dispute between presidential Democratic rivals Barack Obama and Clinton over whether then First Lady Clinton supported the North American Free Trade Agreement when her husband pushed it through Congress in November 1993, it’s hardly surprising that Nafta drew the first headlines. And it didn’t take long for Clinton’s critics to rough her up in no uncertain words.

“Clinton Lie Kills Her Credibility on Trade Policy,” proclaimed the March 20 headline in The Nation magazine. “Now that we know from the 11,000 pages of Clinton White House documents released this week that [the] former First Lady was an ardent advocate for Nafta,” wrote John Nichols, Hillary Clinton has been revealed as “a liar — a put-in-boldface type ‘L-I-A-R’ liar.” The Obama For President campaign quickly agreed. Obama senior strategist David Axelrod told Associated Press reporter Pete Yost that Clinton’s claim that she was a Nafta skeptic back in 1993 was the “political equivalent of consumer fraud.” Clinton now “owes an apology to the people of Ohio and an explanation to the people of this country,” Axelrod added. In case anyone missed the point, Obama’s communications director said that now that the White House papers have been released, “we know that one thing that she was hiding was the truth.”

Clinton spokesman Phil Singer retorted that Obama was the one who couldn’t be trusted on the Nafta dispute. “Senator Obama said that he would not engage in personal attacks, Singer told the AP. “Now, after losses in Ohio and Texas, the Obama campaign is explicitly attacking Senator Clinton’s character.”

So who was right? What did the papers really show? I’ve read them carefully, and can report with confidence that…

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President George W. Bush and his chief of staff, Josh Bolten, are determined to do everything in their power to wrap up the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round of trade liberalizing negotiations before the president leaves office in January 2009, only ten months away. The possible good news, at least for incorrigible optimists, is that there are signs emanating from the WTO’s headquarters in Geneva that the long-troubled negotiations, now in their seventh year, may be rousing from their familiar torpor. So now the president is hoping to set the Doha agenda for the next likely occupant of the Oval Office, who would recognize soon enough that failing to push the deal through Congress would risk serious damage to America’s international economic prestige.

Toward this end, Bush and Bolten brought a new negotiating weapon into the National Security Council last May, in the name of Dan Price. As the deputy national security advisor for international economic affairs, Price’s NSC portfolio ranges from dealing with global warming to energy security issues. But increasingly, Price is playing an important behind-the-scenes White House role as a would-be closer in the Doha negotiations. When he speaks to WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy, EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson, and other top-level representatives of key WTO members from New Delhi to Sao Paulo, the foreigners are made to understand clearly that Price is speaking for the president of the United States. The news about Price’s powerful role, which has received scant publicity, comes from a series of off-the-record interviews with diplomats from Europe and Asia who have spoken with Price, and a handful of Washington lobbyists who have been made privy to the White House’s inside game on Doha. It is confirmed by well-connected administration officials who shrugged and said while they usually don’t talk about their inside strategy, they saw no reason to deny a (rare) story that portrays the Bush White House in a positive light.

Naturally — Washington being gossipy Washington, where perceptions shape all policy discussions — the first question that arises is whether by placing such confidence in Price, the White House is undercutting the president’s top trade negotiator, U.S. Trade Representative Sue Schwab. After all, that’s what sometimes happened during the predecessor Clinton administration, when President Clinton’s White House chief of staff John Podesta and economic adviser Gene Sperling at times famously undercut the negotiating authority of U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky.

The short answer to the present question about whether Schwab is being sidelined is…

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Last Sunday, two days before Ohio Democrats voted in the Buckeye state’s March 4 presidential primary, 60 Minutes broadcast a very compelling story from Chillicothe, a town of some 22,000 about an hour’s drive south of Columbus. Presenter Steve Kroft interviewed a sad-eyed worker who cried softly as he related his despair that he will lose his job in a paper mill this November. Mr. Kroft also interviewed an equally sad-eyed executive from another local paper company, Glatfelter Co., who said he didn’t know how he could continue to compete when he pays American workers some $20-per-hour and his Chinese competitors pay their workers a small fraction of that. We need tariffs to level the playing field, the businessman told Mr. Kroft, who then earnestly asked Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama if they agreed that protectionist tariffs were the answer to the woes of American manufacturing. It was powerful television.

Not to spoil a great story, or to deprive anyone of an opportunity for a good cry. But perhaps more than a few viewers might have refrained from reaching for their hankies if they had known a few basic economic facts that 60 Minutes didn’t tell them. Consider first the executive from Glatfelter’s Chillicothe paper plant with the fearful look in his eyes as he talked about China. Glatfelter is headquartered in York, Pa., and its Chillicothe operation is one of several in Ohio and Pennsylvania. But there’s more. Glatfelter employs more than 3,800 people worldwide, including Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Philippines — plus an office in…China. Last year, Glatfelter reported record profits. And it turns out that the soon-to-be unemployed Ohio paper worker’s job is indeed moving — but to Wisconsin, not China.

The awkward thing about facts is that they can get in the way of a great story.

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