Clintonian free trade-- RIP

From David Weigel in Reason...

The main selling point of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, ratcheted up after Barack Obama started scaring her up a ladder, had been her “35 years of experience,” along with a certain nostalgia for the 1990s, which both Hillary and Bill smugly described on the campaign trail as having been “pretty good.” The linchpin of that claim was the economic boom of the Bill years. Yet last fall Hillary began to soft-pedal or sweep under the carpet the very policies that made the boom possible.

NAFTA was a critical moment in Bill Clinton’s presidency, a New Democratic victory over the old union elements of the party. When Clinton signed the final treaties in 1993, he warned that no government action “can change the fact that information can flash across the world, that people can move money around in the blink of an eye.” He compared trade skepticism to the ways of old and dying industrial nations: “If we learn anything from the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the governments in Eastern Europe, [it’s that] even a totally controlled society cannot resist the winds of change that economics and technology and information flow have imposed in this world of ours.”

As recently as 2006, Hillary Clinton positioned herself as the heir to this trade-accommodating policy. She was not a “die-hard free-trader,” she said at the time, but she also wasn’t “an unreconstructed protectionist with very little regard, frankly, for how trade agreements are actually working.”...

As the campaigns headed to the populist temptations of Wisconsin, Ohio, and Texas, Clinton put out word that she was never on the record agreeing with her husband about NAFTA. The evidence, apparently, is on her side. In For Love of Politics, Sally Bedell Smith’s 2007 biography of the Clintons, former U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor claims he had to convince Hillary Clinton that NAFTA would be good for the country....

More broadly...

That’s what Democratic economic politics, and especially trade politics, have been about in 2008: pleasing the John Edwards voter. The slick-talking North Carolina trial lawyer did not win any primaries this year, but he did intuit that the new Democratic majority in Congress was far more trade-skeptical than the one that Bill Clinton split in half to pass NAFTA....

And...

There you have one of the lessons of this race: When Obama said, in January, that Ronald Reagan had been a “transformative” president in a way that Bill Clinton had not, he was right. Even if Hillary Clinton wins the party’s nomination, she will not do so as a candidate of a lasting Clintonism. The only 1990s economic policies that either Democratic candidate professed to believe in are the slightly higher tax rates that followed President Clinton’s 1993 increase. On health care, the candidates proposed bigger and more expensive plans than the last Democratic president ever pondered during his last six years in office. President Clinton once mulled putting Social Security funds in the stock market; candidates Clinton and Obama proposed funding it through transfer payments from here to eternity.

Still...

Knowing all that, the distance Hillary has traveled from free trade to protectionism is no less shocking. Ten years ago, giving advice at a conference for developing economies in Africa, she warned that countries where the skeptics held sway were going to be left behind. “Look around the globe,” Clinton advised. “Those nations which have lowered trade barriers are prospering more than those that have not.”

It was true in Africa; it’s true in America. It will be true when, as seems likely, one of these Democrats gets the nomination and moderates his or her rhetoric. The crucial issue is how much of that rhetoric was mere pandering and how much represents a true political sea change.