They just don't trust you

As a teenaged Watergate geek of the 1970s, I never thought that trust in government, or authority in general, could get lower than it was then. Maybe I was wrong.

One of the big stories in Washington this spring -- to the extent that people are even following that stuff at this point -- has been President Obama's push for a trade deal with Asia called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP. Basically, the bottom line is that Congress has to pass the TPP so we can find out what's in it (I know we've heard this before, but this time literally). One thing that's united every American president of the last generation -- liberal or conservative -- has been their unwavering support for "free trade." There's certainly an argument that old fashioned protectionism won't work in the 21st Century. But no president has made a coherent case for how these deals going back to NAFTA have helped the American worker, especially as wages have been not even treading water since the 1980s.

And yet somehow folks are shocked, shocked that this mysterious but probably-not-good deal isn't breezing through Capitol Hill. David Corn has a good analysis of why the TPP went down in Round 1:

From the Warren perspective, Obama and the White House had become captive of the Rubin wing of the party—named after Robert Rubin, the former Goldman Sachs honcho who became Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration and went on to help lead Citigroup. To the dismay of Warren's backers, Obama was not engaging with her criticisms; he was deriding them.

Despite what Obama officials were saying, there are real policy issues at the heart of this debate. One is transparency: the TPP draft under construction is confidential, and Obama was asking lawmakers to support the fast track bill before they knew what was in the deal. As Warren said in a recent interview, "The president has committed only to letting the public see this deal after Congress votes to authorize fast track. At that point it will be impossible for us to amend the agreement or to block any part of it without tanking the whole TPP. The TPP is basically done. If the president is so confident it's a good deal, he should declassify the text and let people see it before asking Congress to tie its hands on fixing it." And in a recent speech she explained how fast track can be exploited to undercut Wall Street reform: "A Republican President could easily use a future trade deal to override our domestic financial rules.  And this is hardly a hypothetical possibility: We are already deep into negotiations with the European Union on a trade agreement and big banks on both sides of the Atlantic are gearing up to use that agreement to water down financial regulations. A six-year fast track bill is the missing link they need to make that happen."

All true, but isn't the real story here lack of trust, pure and simple? A lot of Democrats, a healthy smattering of Republicans, and most everyday Americans just don't see how this TPP is going to help, and taking the White House's word is not nearly enough.

Also this week, the controversial veteran journalist Seymour Hersh is out with a piece asserting that everything you know about the killing of Osama bin Laden is wrong. Probably not all of Hersh's story is right, either, but the official version of what happened in Abbottabad has holes you could fly one of those funny-looking helicopters through. A lot of people complain about the widespread lack of respect for authority these days. But hasn't authority earned our disresepect?