Abstract

Trade Wins

The author discusses the positions on free trade taken by the 2004 Democratic presidential candidates. The late U.S. senator from Minnesota Paul Wellstone would have loved the turn the race for the Democratic presidential nomination has taken. Wellstone believed that the mass outpouring of opposition to the World Trade Organization in particular, and to the corporate free-trade agenda in general, had provided Democrats with an outline for the reassertion of a progressive populist politics that would bring blue-collar workers back into the party fold, reconnect the party with its rural roots and energize young people concerned about sweatshops and human rights. But neither Gore nor Bradley, both resolute free traders, would talk about the growing evidence that free-trade policies were benefiting corporations but doing severe damage to workers, the environment and communities--in the United States and abroad. What a difference four years makes. The issues that were locked out of the 2000 Democratic debates are front and center in 2004 and played an important part in securing John Edwards's strong second-place showing in Wisconsin against John Kerry. Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean deserve credit for pushing Kerry to begin rewriting his talking points on trade. But it is the increasingly populist campaign of Edwards that has forced Kerry to start getting specific about how he would break with the Clinton-Bush approach.