POLITICS  | MORNING MEMO 

Hillary Clinton Walks Tightrope as Pressure Grows to Take Stance on Trade Deal

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Hillary Rodham Clinton at  a furniture  company in Keene, N.H., last month, after announcing that  she would run for president. Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist for The New York Times 
Liberal Democrats are intensifying their pressure on Hillary Rodham Clinton to oppose President Obama’s Pacific trade deal as detrimental to American jobs. But Mr. Obama’s allies want her to endorse the accord, which the president has called a boon to the United States economy.
And Mrs. Clinton, stuck between the progressives she must woo in a Democratic nomination fight and the president under whom she served, has remained, for the most part, mum.
The issue has become the first major policy test in her fledgling campaign, with Mrs. Clinton under mounting pressure to pick a side in the delicate and heated debate over the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, a 12-nation trade agreement that Mr. Obama has aggressively pursued and that faced a critical vote in Congress on Tuesday.
Just 48 hours after Mrs. Clinton delighted liberal Democrats with a proposal to expand citizenship eligibility to immigrants who are in the country illegally, protesters on Thursday urged her to speak out against the trade deal.
Protesters outside a fund-raiser attended by Mrs. Clinton last week in Beverly Hills, Calif.Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press 
“Stop the TPP!” read one of the signs held by demonstrators who circled the mansion in Beverly Hills, Calif., where Mrs. Clinton attended a high-dollar fund-raiser.
The left wing has not been this agitated over a trade deal since the last time Mrs. Clinton ran for president, when her squishy position on the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed into law by her husband in 1993, ignited debate during the Democratic primary.
“The fact is, she was saying great things about Nafta until she started running for president,” Mr. Obama said of Mrs. Clinton during their 2008 fight for the nomination.
This time, in an odd twist, it is Mr. Obama’s trade deal that haunts Mrs. Clinton’s early candidacy. If her stance on immigration, which would go further than Mr. Obama’s executive actions, offended the White House last week, any remarks she might make against the administration’s trade accord could fracture her already delicate relationship with the president.
On Saturday, Mr. Obama vigorously pushed back against Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who has said the trade accord will help Wall Street and hurt American workers.
“The truth of the matter is that Elizabeth is, you know, a politician like everybody else,” Mr. Obama told Yahoo News.

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“She’s absolutely wrong,” he added.
But even a tacit endorsement of the accord would put Mrs. Clinton on the opposite side of a very vocal liberal base of her party, which she has increasingly been courting in her campaign.
The chances of pleasing both sides are slim.
Mr. Obama’s allies — including congressional Republicans and business leaders who support the trade accord — as well as liberal Democrats, labor leaders, environmentalists and human rights advocates, have forcefully called for Mrs. Clinton to take a stance.
If there is one thing both sides agree on, it is that Mrs. Clinton needs to say more than the vague comment she made in New Hampshire last month: “Any trade deal has to produce jobs and raise wages and increase prosperity and protect our security.”
“She can’t sit on the sidelines and let the president swing in the wind here,” John A. Boehner, the Republican House speaker, said on the NBC News program “Meet the Press” last week.

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From the other side came this: “This is one you can’t waffle. You’re either for the T.P.P. or against it,” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is seeking the Democratic nomination and opposes the deal, told MSNBC.
The Huffington Post reported that John D. Podesta, chairman of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, had jokingly bemoaned in private, “Can you make it go away?”
The Clinton campaign may not be able to make the issue go away, but it could be avoided until after the vote on Tuesday on legislation that would have granted Mr. Obama the ability to “fast-track” talks on a final trade deal, which liberals vehemently oppose. Mrs. Clinton has no public events scheduled this week, only private fund-raisers and a meeting in Brooklyn with donors on Thursday. A spokesman for her campaign declined to comment.
“She hasn’t taken any steps in the wrong direction, but she hasn’t gone as far as many Democrats who have spoken out against ‘fast track,’ ” Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said. “She’s punted a little so far.”
When she does finally weigh in, Mrs. Clinton’s position could give the liberal wing of her party pause. Left-leaning Democrats have been encouraged by her recent campaign speeches about inequality and immigration, but many still harbor concerns that Mrs. Clinton’s policies will not do enough to advance their causes.
The campaign had hoped to delay outlining her policy proposals until later this summer, but the pressure over the trade deal could prompt Mrs. Clinton to detail her domestic policies sooner.
The debate has remnants of her 2008 campaign, when Nafta became a litmus test for whether Mrs. Clinton had the liberal credentials of her opponents, Barack Obamaand John Edwards.
Mrs. Clinton was accused of political posturing when she opposed Nafta, the signature trade deal of her husband’s administration, which created the world’s largest trading bloc, among Canada, the United States and Mexico. Coming out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she supported as secretary of state under Mr. Obama, could generate similar criticism.
“She was working for President Obama, and you do what your boss does,” Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, said of Mrs. Clinton’s past support for the partnership.
For Mrs. Clinton, coming out against the deal would be tantamount to a repudiation not just of a major legislative goal of Mr. Obama’s, but also of Mr. Clinton’s economic legacy. There are few policies Mr. Clinton is more defensive about than Nafta, which many on the left have come to see as the ultimate symbol of the perils of globalization.
More than two decades later, Nafta still haunts Mrs. Clinton, who opposed parts of the deal as first lady, and it ignites a visceral reaction on the campaign trail.
“If she really does stand with working and middle-class Americans, she needs to come out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership,” said Arturo Carmona, executive director of Presente.org and one of the protesters outside Mrs. Clinton’s fund-raiser on Thursday. He pointed to damage he said was done by Nafta.
After a speech at the Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., on Friday, Mr. Obama said liberal Democrats who opposed the trade deal — which would include Asia-Pacific nations and affect 40 percent of America’s exports and imports — were stuck in the 1990s.
“Their arguments are based on fears, or they’re fighting Nafta, the trade deal that was passed 25 years ago, or 20 years ago,” he said.