The Occasional Observer

I was actually shocked when I pulled up WSJ.com this morning. The lead story: Republicans grow skeptical on free trade. If the article had said that GOP support for fair trade was trending up, I wouldn't have been that surprised. Or if it said that free trade sentiment was no longer dominant in the general population, I wouldn't have been surprised either. But that Republicans "believe free trade is bad for the U.S. economy" by a 2-to-1 margin? Jaw dropping. [and also shocking that the story wouldn't be buried by the WSJ, which would like to see fair-traders drawn and quartered]

Fair trade has been actively discussed by exactly two of the GOP Presidential candidates: Huckabee and Hunter*. The other candidates have expressed only free-trade sentiment, with varying degrees of clarity and stridency. Could this issue also be a part of Huck's climb in the polls? Perhaps.

But this issue is, of course, much bigger than the '08 GOP horserace. From one sided tariff laws, to currency manipulation, to a glut of unskilled labor coming unchecked from Mexico, this country's middle class has been squeezed by globalization. It has seen real wages and standard of living stagnate, despite raging growth in GDP (with very few pullbacks) over the past 25 years. Apparently, they've seen enough.

Take the reaction to the immigration bills of the past two sessions. No longer was the issue framed exclusively as a social issue of "changing the fabric of our nation," nor as a discussion of abstract political principles (i.e., "a nation of immigrants"). People started viewing immigration as a bread-and-butter pocketbook issue. That's why we had a massive grass roots snap-back at the amnesty plans--a response that startled even veteran elected officials like McCain.

The same goes for trade. People are willing to accept academic theories on the win-win nature of global trade as long as they don't have to endure 2.5 decades of reality undermining those theories (mind you, free-trade has succeeded in growing the domestic and global economy, but has failed large swaths of the middle class--and that is where the votes are).

It is surprising that with 60% of Republican voters supporting fair trade, none of the front-runners have embraced a fair trade position (sorry Huck, you're not there yet update 11/5/07, Huck's there now!). But then again, the fair-traders have not been "activated," or come to a trigger point, the way the anti-illegal-immigration crowd did. I wonder if they will.

*Paul's position is a little more muddled: I believe he opposes free-trade agreements on the grounds that they go beyond the authority granted in the Constitution, but not because he wants to see international trade diminished. The only statement I could find pertinent to foreign trade on his campaign web site's "issues" page was this: "Let us have a strong America, conducting open trade, travel, communication, and diplomacy with other nations." I also found this article from Paul written in '99, in which he uses the old rhetorical device of equating "fair trade" with "isloationism."