Mike Michaud: “When I campaigned for office for my seat 5 years ago, the cornerstone of my campaign was fixing our broken trade policy.…”

“When I campaigned for office for my seat 5 years ago, the cornerstone of my campaign was fixing our broken trade policy. I firmly believe in order to address our trade imbalance, we have to change the model. It appears that the deal that was cut a few weeks ago by the administration and the leadership does not change that model. It is the same old NAFTA model with a couple of improvements. Americans don't want the same old model with a few Band-Aids. They want a fix. This election reaffirms that Americans are calling for an all-out new trade policy that puts our industry on a competitive playing field. Any deals between Capitol Hill and the Bush administration that fails to change this flawed model means that we are going to continue to see the U.S. trade deficit continue to rise, and it is going to destroy hundreds of thousands of our critical middle-class workers, our manufacturing base here in this country. In Maine, we lost over 23 percent of our manufacturing base alone.”