The Wall Street Journal had a really good story today about Bush and trade (reg. required). It all-but accuses the president of (gasp!) shifting his policies to fit with the political winds of the day. In fact, it more-or-less says so in the very first sentence.
For a president who boasts that he says what he means and means what he says, George W. Bush’s trade record hasn’t been so simple to parse.
The WSJ’s Jackie Calmes does a solid job in chronicling how Bush’s trade policies have been all over the map.
Over the past four years, Mr. Bush has swung from free-market candidate to sometime-protectionist president and back again. Lately he has re-emerged as a full-throated free-trader, to the wonder of folks on both sides of the debate.
And to no one’s surprise, White House officials explained to the WSJ that the trade policies have been shaped almost exclusively by political calculations, not principles or genuine beliefs. Indeed, Bush aides apparently concede to the flip-flopping, but prefer to call it “repositioning.”
According to an administration official, Mr. Bush signaled his repositioning in a speech nearly two months ago at a Women’s Entrepreneurship Forum in Cleveland. He purposely spoke in the Midwest after advisers had spent some weeks examining the trade issue through a “political lens.”
Democratic rival John Kerry “had been campaigning in the Midwest,” hitting hard on job losses, outsourcing and unfair trade as he battled to win the states’ primaries, the official recalls. “So we had two ways to go: You could match his pessimistic rhetoric and come up with billions of dollars in federal programs that might help … or we could come up with a positive message — that we can compete, and we will.”
Considering the record, it’s hard to deny that Bush has been wildly inconsistent and inclined to shape trade policies based on which plans would have the biggest political payoff.
To win enough Republican votes, Mr. Bush agreed to $73.4 billion more in farm subsidies over a decade, and then imposed tariffs on steel. Both acts also were aimed at helping re-elect Republican majorities in Congress’s 2002 midterm elections — and himself in 2004. He also agreed not to try to lift trade barriers for a variety of foreign products.
Last December, Mr. Bush revoked the steel tariffs under pressure from European trade partners and U.S. steel-user industries. The farm subsidies, meanwhile, have helped stymie all subsequent trade agreements. Still unresolved are longstanding disputes with Canada over lumber and with Mexico over sugar; resolutions would anger powerful interests in election-battleground states.
The administration has concluded just two bilateral trade agreements — with Chile and Singapore. It has negotiated deals with Australia and a group of Central American countries, but those agreements exempt such politically protected interests as sugar, dairy products and beef. Even so, the White House probably won’t push Congress to ratify them this year.
Remind me again which candidate is the incessant flip-flopper?