Anyway, Jagdish Bhagwati, the deity of free trade, had an interesting Op/Ed in the FT on which Democratic candidate, Clinton or Obama, is better from a trade standpoint. Keep in mind that Bhagwati is looking at this from a lesser of two evils perspective. In that spirit, I enjoyed this back-handed compliment:
The Russian proverb goes that, if you are looking for a good son-in-law, you would not ask whether he drank but only how he behaved when he was drunk. Similarly, no Democratic candidate during the primaries can be anything but a protectionist. The only question is: of the two, which is likely to be friendlier as president to the cause of multilateral free trade? Careful scrutiny suggests that the odds are in favour of Mr Obama.
Heh heh. The rest of the piece, which I find rather odd, explains why Obama's union supporters are less protectionist than Clinton's, why Bill's passage of NAFTA creates the need for Hillary to come out strongly against it, and why protectionist legislation that Obama has proposed is so unrealistic that it will fail (this is a plus for Bhagwati).
An interesting read but I really can't quite understand why Bhagwati wrote it in the first place. Perhaps it's just another opportunity to highlight the protectionism of Democrats to a sympathetic FT readership. Maybe that explains his final paragraph:
[S]ince today’s protectionism owes principally to fear of imports from the developing countries, it leaves protectionist Democrats in an uncomfortable position. They assert cosmopolitanism and international altruism while trying in effect to close the door, on the basis of flawed analysis that blames globalisation on countries trading their way out of poverty. The “hope” and “change” that young Americans want from a new Democratic president are incompatible with protectionism and require instead a new architecture of supportive institutions to meet the challenges of a new epoch.