Two Cheers for Obama

The bad news is that President Obama is keeping his campaign promises to raise taxes on upper-income families, borrow-and-spend, use taxpayers' money to fund the survival of auto-company dinosaurs, take over the health care system, and otherwise pursue an agenda that it is an understatement to describe as ambitious.

The good news is that President Obama is not keeping all of his campaign promises. There has been no precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, Guantánamo is likely to remain the home of terrorists for some time, the promised "transparency" is not so all-encompassing as to include pictures of the treatment accorded the bad guys we managed to capture, and we have not lurched into protectionism. It's Bush 2.0 grouse liberals, according to the Financial Times.

Recall that during his run for the White House Obama opposed the trade agreements with Korea and Colombia, accused the Bush administration of failing to deal with China's "manipulation" of its currency, threatened to use "the hammer of a potential opt-out" to force Mexico and Canada to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and quickened the hearts of his trade union supporters by hinting that the era of free trade, which he said benefits multinationals but not the average working family, would end as soon as he arrived in Washington.

Campaigning is one thing; governing is another. Seated in the Oval Office, "Obama is subject to the same geopolitical imperatives as was President Bush," says Rod Hunter, who served as President Bush's Senior Director of the National Security Council and is now a colleague of mine at the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank. It is one thing to throw raw meat to the trade union lions during a campaign, quite another to antagonize Canada, which has troops in Afghanistan to supplement our own; Mexico, which is an ally in the war on drugs and a potential source of oil supplies; South Korea, important to our efforts to contain its Northern neighbor, and other countries.

So we have the new Obama. NAFTA stays, as is; Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who during his confirmation hearings accused China of manipulating its currency, now says it isn't; and the President has announced "a plan of action" to obtain congressional approval for pending free trade agreements with Panama and South Korea, and is in conversations with Colombia's President, lvaro Uribe, about getting the agreement with his country through a very reluctant congress. Obama has found that he also favors " a strong market-opening agreement for agriculture, industrial goods and services through the Doha development round [of negotiations at the World Trade Organization] and through other negotiations."

Add to that the repeated statements by the President's U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, who has been telling relieved business audiences that trade plays "an important role in creating and sustaining better-paying jobs here at home." Specifically, Kirk wants to expand trade with the Asia-Pacific region because "there is an extraordinary upside to us" in doing so.

"It is reassuring that President Obama's trade agenda appears to be aligning closer to those of Presidents Bush and Clinton -- and to their nine predecessors -- rather than to the protectionist positions he took on the campaign trail," Theodore Kassinger, former Deputy Commerce Secretary and now a lawyer with O'Melveny & Meyers here in Washington, tells me.

But before awarding the President the Adam Smith Award For Combating Protectionism, consider this. Obama's first priority is his domestic agenda: "reform" health care, restructure the energy industries, involve the federal government more deeply in education, fight the recession, save the auto companies, control bankers' bonuses, revise the regulatory rules that govern the financial sector, and win what is now his war in Afghanistan. Trade is lower down on the list.