Trade Debate Heads In the Right Direction

Over the last few weeks, we have seen Democratic presidential candidates move more forcefully toward a populist position on trade, articulating a "fair trade" vision that has been missing in many presidential election contests.

Last week, for instance, Barack Obama sounded downright John Edwardsian at a General Motors plant in Janesville, Wisconsin [1], indicting NAFTA and promising to use the power of the presidency to make sure future trade deals are fair.

Now, today, we get this line from Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) in the New York Times [2]:

“I’m tired of being played for a patsy,” Mrs. Clinton said at the hall. “We have the largest market in the world. It’s time we said to the rest of the world, ‘If you want to have anything to do with our market, you have to play by our rules.’ ”

Clinton's point is particularly important. Even though every country and every company wants access to our market, we haven't been using that leverage in any way at all. That is, we have been granting access to our market without any conditions (better labor practices, better environmental practices, etc.) that might improve our own country and the world. A president who understands the stupidity of such a policy and who works to change would be a very real, and very serious change.

That's precisely what the Establishment in Washington really fears. As you can see by the hysterics in the Washington Post's latest editorial [3] on the subject, the media and the political elite are absolutely petrified that our trade policies may be reformed and made more fair. But with polls continuing to show that Americans have soured on the free market fundamentalism that has given us our current lobbyist-written trade policy, it looks like change is coming.