Uh-oh. Looks like Hillary Clinton’s involved in another trade war. But this time her opponent is not Mark Penn. It’s her husband.

And it’s all over that most American of businesses, Harley-Davidson.

Here’s today’s Harriburg Patriot-News:

Mentioning job cuts at the Harley-Davidson plant and a campaign stop at Central Market House in 1992 with her husband, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton did her best to connect with potential voters at a rally in downtown York on Saturday….

She mentioned the 300 or so job cuts Harley-Davidson announced at its York plant last week and the job cuts announced late last year at Hershey.

Clinton promised the crowd, where several union signs were being held, that she would renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement and take a time-out before entering into new trade agreements.

It’s unclear whether such a move would do more good or harm to Harley and Hershey workers. Both companies have said in recent years that they are looking to beef up sales of their American-made products to countries in Asia to offset declining sales in the United States.

For example, Harley-Davidson’s first quarter earnings show sales of its motorcycles in the United States declined by about 12 percent, while its Asia sales showed growth.

Which, as delicious irony would have it, was foreshadowed by President Bill Clinton.
Here’s the November 11, 1999 New York Times:

President Clinton today saluted a much-exported American icon, the Harley-Davidson motorcycle, in an effort to prepare the political ground for two high-stakes trade negotiations that are already touching off raucous debate in Washington and around the country.

As Mr. Clinton donned a leather Harley-Davidson jacket at the company’s factory in York and mused about the possibility of becoming a biker at the end of his presidency, half of his economic team was in Beijing in a last-ditch effort to strike a deal with China that could vastly open the market for American producers.

While Mr. Clinton said nothing about the tense talks, Harley-Davidson was a fitting backdrop: It has had huge sales success in Japan, home ground for its archrival Honda, but it remains barred from the Chinese market.

In a small meeting with workers here, and then a campaign-style speech in front of the factory’s 2,700 workers, Mr. Clinton spent much of the day trying to build support for America’s position at the round of global trade negotiations that start in Seattle at the end of this month.

… he offered a series of arguments about why trade helps American workers and consumers, and he cited Harley-Davidson, which exports 66,000 cycles a year. ‘’In spite of all those numbers,'’ Mr. Clinton said, ‘’there’s more debate on whether trade is good for us now than there was in 1992.'’

And it looks like there’s even more debate nine years later, between the Clintons themselves. In this trade war, we’ll side with Clinton — Bill Clinton.