Obama to Push One Free Trade Pact He Pledged to Oppose & May Push Another Two, As Well

As a candidate, Barack Obama said he would oppose the Panama, South Korea and Colombia Free Trade Agreements. You can verify that (among other places) here. Now, Reuters has the report on a declaration from Tim Geithner (not a shock coming from him, a devout Rubinite):

U.S. President Barack Obama will work with Congress to move forward on long-stalled free trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said on Tuesday.

The Obama administration's endorsement of the Panama pact appears to be a straight-up betrayal of the candidate's campaign promise because the administration says it wants to pass the pact "quickly" and without changes. This is particularly bad not just because it violates a campaign promise, but because its well-known problem of legitimizing and legally securing various tax havens has become an even bigger problem in the new era of huge deficits - that is, in the era when we especially need to be closing tax havens, not protecting them. (For a look into how the Panama FTA would help preserve and potentially expand these corporate tax havens, check out my previous column, this piece by trade specialist Peter Riggs, or this new article in the Panama Star newspaper entitled "Panama A Poster Child for Tax Evasion").

As for the administration's endorsement of the South Korea and Colombia trade agreement, we can't yet call it a betrayal because the White House has left open the possibility of trying to reform those deals before pushing for their passage. So it's possible that the president could demand and successfully attain major changes to those deals that would then make them so substantially different and better as to make the old campaign promises moot. I think it's improbable that he will push for or get the kinds of transformative changes to those deals that would make his promises moot - but I'm willing to withhold judgment until we know, as the president has been exceeding progressive expectations of late (specifically on budget and health care policy).

Obviously, between this declaration and Obama's efforts to water down Buy America laws in the stimulus, the president is showing much less rhetorical courage on issues of trade and globalization than he promised to industrial swing-state voters during his campaign. And while I understand that presidents often cater to Big Money after running populist campaigns, and understand that Obama thinks its somewhat funny for the public to expect politicians to fulfill their campaign promises, I expected Obama to have at least learned the political lesson that NAFTA taught about the dangers* of trampling his party's base on a divisive issue like trade.

True, aside from the total endorsement of the very same Panama FTA he pledged to oppose, Obama hasn't trampled that base in the way Clinton did with NAFTA. But the noises his administration is making on trade are not great, and certainly do not comport with his far more concrete and robust promises on the campaign trail.

* Recall that candidate Bill Clinton promised not to push NAFTA unless it was substantially reformed, then months later pushed the old NAFTA "over the dead bodies" of the Democratic base, only to watch that base (and specifically union households) exhibit depressed turnout numbers in the 1994 election.

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