"Why Should We Have A Fight Over Continuing The Bush Trade Policy?"

I'm wondering exactly what Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) - and likely, many people in the industrial Midwest - are wondering right now:

Obama, who vowed during his campaign last year to rework the trade policies of President George W. Bush, is now embracing some of the deals endorsed by his predecessor. Kirk said he will try to move forward agreements with Colombia and Panama, and may pursue others. A majority of Democrats in Congress have votedagainst other recent trade pacts.

“People across the country will scratch their heads and wonder why” Obama is asking Congress to approve the Panama and Colombia deals that Bush negotiated, Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, told reporters yesterday. “Why should we have a fight over continuing the Bush trade policy”

Policy-wise, it's incredibly strange that an economic crisis brought on, in part, by rigged trade policies would spur an administration to claim that the economic crisis requires the enactment of more rigged trade policies. That doesn't seem like "pragmatism" - that seems like pure ideology and free-trade fundamentalism.

Politically, this is just downright dumb. As I wrote in a past column, we saw what happened when a Democratic president split apart the Democratic Party on an issue like trade at the beginning of his term. It was called NAFTA, and the move severely damaged the Democratic Party at the polls. I'm not saying this will be another 1994, but I am saying the Republicans would like nothing more than a Democratic president once again "running over the dead bodies" of the Democratic Party base and therefore weakening the Democratic Party as a whole.

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