Obama is the free trader free traders have been waiting for

THAT might be overstating things a bit, but as

Salon

's Andrew Leonard

points out

, all the tea leaf reading during the NAFTA debates failed to note what presdential candidate Barack Obama had to say about globalisation in his book

The Audacity of Hope

We can try to slow globalization, but we can't stop it. The U.S. economy is now so integrated with the rest of the world, and digital commerce so widespread, that it's hard to even imagine, much less enforce, an effective regime of protectionism. A tariff on imported steel may give temporary relief to U.S. steel producers, but it will make every U.S. manufacturer that uses steel in its products less competitive on the world market...



I told the President that I believed in the benefits of trade... But I said that resistance to CAFTA had less to do with the specifics of the agreement and more to do with the growing insecurities of the American worker. Unless we found strategies to allay those fears, and sent a strong signal to American workers that the federal government was on their side, protectionist sentiment would only grow...



I ended up voting against CAFTA... My vote gave me no satisfaction, but I felt it was the only way to register a protest against what I considered to be the White House's inattention to the losers from free trade.

This blogger feels at least somewhat vindicated, having

written

An optimist might say, however, that in building a class-based coalition, Mr Obama will create the conditions necessary to strengthen the social safety net. And some might then say--Dani Rodrik, perhaps--that by insuring workers against the buffeting winds of trade, Mr Obama will have secured the ability to expand globalisation without strong domestic opposition. One hesitates to project hopes on a candidate to this extent, but it seems possible.

not long ago:It is interesting that Mr Obama mentions concern about the losers from trade informing his vote against CAFTA. My inbox this morning contained a link to

this new discussion paper

We first show that trade liberalization under CAFTA has a positive effect on growth, employment and poverty [in Honduras] but the effect is small. What really matters for Honduras is the assembly (maquila) industry. CAFTA liberalized the rules of origin for imports into this industry. That raises the growth rate of output by 1.4% and reduces poverty by 11% in 2020 relative to what it would otherwise have been. Increasing capital formation through an increase in foreign investment in response to CAFTA has an even larger impact on growth, employment and poverty.

from the International Food Policy Research Institute. The abstract reads in part:The stakes are high for the world's poor. Another reason to believe that economists may wish to adopt a tolerant stance toward flexibility in the language used to discuss expanded trade. Openness should be the goal, not rhetorical purity.