Senate candidate took hard line on trade. Now he says Trump’s policies are hurting NC.
During his unsuccessful 2010 bid for U.S. Senate, Democrat Cal Cunningham was as hawkish on trade as President Donald Trump is now.
He called for renegotiating unfair trade agreements and threatening tariffs on China, central tenets of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and key policies during his administration.
Now running again for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate, Cunningham has criticized Trump for the way he has carried out some of those same policies — calling his trade war with China and use of tariffs “reckless” and “harmful.”
Cunningham in a phone interview with McClatchy this week said trade, however, is one potential area of agreement with the Republican president.
“I don’t know that my positions have changed,” Cunningham said. “When I talk openly about working with this president if he’s in a second term or holding him accountable if he’s not doing good things for North Carolina, trade is a place where we may be able to find some common ground.”
On USMCA replacing NAFTA
This was a big week for Trump’s trade policies. He signed “phase one” of a trade agreement with China on Wednesday, and the USMCA trade deal, Trump’s long-sought replacement for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) passed the Senate 89-10 on Thursday, giving Trump a signature accomplishment just before his impeachment trial begins.
The Democratic-led House passed the deal in December after winning some labor and environmental concessions.
Cunningham is one of five Democratic candidates vying in the March 3 primary to run against Republican Sen. Thom Tillis. He and state Sen. Erica Smith have led in polling.
Tillis has been a strong supporter of the agreement, often blasting House Democrats for what he says have been unnecessary delays in bringing forward the legislation.
“President Trump promised to replace NAFTA with a better trade deal for American workers, and he deserves a tremendous amount of credit for negotiating the USMCA, which will provide a great boost to North Carolina’s small businesses and hardworking farmers,” Tillis said in a statement.
Cunningham, a former state senator, Army veteran and corporate lawyer, has also been critical of Tillis for supporting Trump’s trade policies, linking them to pain for North Carolina’s farmers.
Cunningham said he did not have a definitive position on the USMCA, but said it sounds like “a good bipartisan solution” and said the final agreement is “better today than the version we saw earlier last year” before the House changes.
Trade history
Cunningham, in 2010 and today, rooted his dissatisfaction with American trade agreements in its impact on his hometown of Lexington. Once a capital of furniture manufacturing, Lexington and other towns in the Piedmont have seen those businesses decimated since the late 1990s.
NAFTA negotiations began in the late 1980s and the agreement went into effect in 1994.
Cunningham blamed the deal and others like the Central America Free Trade Agreement, passed in 2005, for the loss of furniture jobs from Lexington and other smaller towns in North Carolina.
“It’s very personal to me that we get these trade deals right,” Cunningham said.
His 2010 campaign reflected those themes. He called for renegotiating trade agreements with countries in the Western Hemisphere and said he wanted to “take on China and those that close their markets to our products.” He lost his 2010 bid to Elaine Marshall in a Democratic runoff.
In a television ad at the time, Cunningham, an Army veteran, said he was running for the Senate “to fight a different kind of war against unfair trade deals with China and tax giveaways that send North Carolina jobs overseas.”
If his position hasn’t changed, Cunningham’s tenor has. He now says he wants to defend North Carolina farmers against Trump’s “reckless tariffs.”
“While Senator Tillis and President Trump have taken tough, America-first stances on trade that have yielded historic agreements that benefit North Carolinians, Cal Cunningham’s current position on the issue displays just how far he’s moved to the left in order to appease his radical Democratic base,” said Andrew Romeo, Tillis campaign spokesman, in a statement.
On Smith’s campaign website, she said that declining populations, the loss of manufacturing jobs, lower agricultural commodity prices and recent tariffs “have placed the rural regions of our country in economic distress.”
“Our economic policies, tax and spend planning and regulations should be constructed in a manner that provides businesses with certainty and incentives, and consumers with confidence and more income,” Smith wrote on her site.
China tariffs
Trump has levied stiff tariffs against China with rates escalating on an increasing number of products as his administration works on a long-term agreement with the world’s most populous country. The president has used tariffs and the threat of them in negotiations with allies like Canada and European nations as well as adversaries.
China imposed retaliatory tariffs that hit key North Carolina agriculture products like soybeans, pork and poultry. The federal government has announced $28 billion in support payments to farmers to help offset losses due to the trade dispute. In July, North Carolina farmers got $105 million, almost all to soybean and cotton farmers in the state.
“This is where I would lodge my deepest criticisms. We have very whimsically been threatening and then backing off of tariffs,” Cunningham said. “The people who are paying the price for the lack of strategy are North Carolina consumers who are paying more for durable goods and North Carolina farmers who don’t have markets today.”
Cunningham said North Carolina farmers want markets to sell to, not payments from the government.
Tills said Trump’s “negotiating tactics are clearly working.” He said companies have rerouted their supply chains to not include China, a problem for the country. Tillis added that as part of the agreement China will be increasing its agricultural purchases from the U.S. — good news, he said, for North Carolina’s pork and poultry producers. In the deal, the U.S. will reduce tariffs on China in return for China purchasing more American goods.
“If we had not gone to the brink to give China some idea of how far we could go, we wouldn’t be signing this agreement,” Tillis said Wednesday at the U.S. Capitol.
“If you look at the effect of the president’s tariffs on what was already challenging economic circumstances on China, they know that we know what they know — they can’t continue to grow unless they have a U.S. market to do business in.”
He added that China is now on notice about other issues, including intellectual property theft and forced technological transfers.
Tillis told North Carolina farmers in Union County last year that he now views trade with China through an additional national security lens.
“I see a China that’s using an unfair trade relationship with us to fund their plan to be the military and economic superpower by 2050,” Tillis said, according to WFAE.
In 2009, President Barack Obama put stiff tariffs on Chinese tires for cars and light trucks because of impacts on American producers. In his 2010 television ad, Cunningham endorsed those tariffs. He said “the threat of tariffs, like we did with China’s cheap tire imports, will get their attention.”
“Tariffs are only one tool in enforcing our global trade policy. The president has relied on them very heavily,” he said this week. “It’s clear we’ve got to hold China accountable, and I think working with our allies is an important and missing component of how we get from where we are to more fairness out of China.”
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This story was originally published January 16, 2020 at 12:24 PM with the headline "Senate candidate took hard line on trade. Now he says Trump’s policies are hurting NC.."
