Mitt Romney is kicking off a three-day tour through Ohio, the state he badly needs to win, where Barack Obama has held a stubborn lead for months. Not surprisingly, Romney’s arrival coincides with a new ad hitting Obama for being too soft in pushing back against China’s trade violations. Romney’s been hitting this protectionist line since early in the Republican primaries, which has raised eyebrows coming from a man who has thrived on the realities of global capitalism as much as he has. But I recently came across a remarkable video clip from just three years ago that shows just how radically Romney has shifted on the subject of trade with China.

While reporting a possible piece on Romney’s foreign policy, I discovered a video of a luncheon chat that Romney held in September 2009 at the Foreign Policy Initiative, the organization founded by Bill Kristol to advance the neo-conservative cause. Romney spends most of the discussion pressing a muscular line on the Middle East, Russia and elsewhere. There is an amusing backdrop to the event -- the moderator is Dan Senor, the former Bush administration spokesman in Iraq who tutored Romney on foreign policy during the 2008 campaign and is now a leading advisor on his 2012 team. In replying to Senor’s questions, Romney often turns back toward him as if for approval; after all, Senor helped Romney craft the answers. But near the end of the luncheon, at the 31:30 mark, there is a question from Senor about Obama’s decision that same month to slap tariffs on cheap Chinese tires flooding the U.S., imports that the administration argued violated WTO rules. The question sets Romney loose – he launches on a long, fluid disquisition with nary an affirming glance at Senor. I am going to give the answer in full, because it is quite striking in light of Romney’s current anti-China rhetoric. The particularly eye-catching lines are in bold, but I wanted to provide the full context.

Senor: There is a major trade issue in the news now regarding China and our protection of the tire manufacturing industry. What is your reaction to this controversy and the decision by the administration?

Romney: I’m glad I can address that in this room, because this is a sophisticated audience and my answer cannot be boiled down to a couple of lines. There is understandable resistance on the part of almost all people to any change that would provide additional productivity. Now, you hear all around America, everyone cheers productivity, but that’s just because most people don’t know what it is. They think productivity means everyone’s working harder and faster and better and therefore we’re all doing better. But productivity really means that more stuff is being created by fewer people. If a nation is highly productive it means that fewer people are able to make more and more stuff. And the nation’s wealth is a function of how productive it is, how much stuff is made by its people, and if you want to see wealthier and wealthier people, you want to see more and more productivity, or more and more things made by the people of that nation.

A lot of people don’t like that idea. You may say, sure, everybody does. A simple example -- let’s pretend there’s a little country with 200 people. This is a long time ago -- 100 people raise the food, 100 people build the homes. Someone comes up with the idea of making a plow, hitching it to a farm animal and now they only need 50 people to raise the food. Is that a good idea or a bad idea? To the 50 people who lose their jobs, it’s a very bad idea, and they will resist with great energy and passion the idea of allowing horses to draw plows because it will make their life far more uncertain, at best. Those of us who stand back a bit say, no no no, don’t you understand that by having these plows and releasing those 50 people that someone, one of them or someone else is going to come up with something else for them to do? Making chairs, making movies whatever that is going to make everyone better off. More productivity will make everybody wealthier and more successful.