NAFTA: The WaPo to the Rescue

A double dose of NAFTA defense from the WaPo this weekend. First there was this editorial in Saturday's paper, entitled, "At Best, a Pander," subtitled, "The Democratic candidates' intemperate promise to renegotiate NAFTA." It blasts Democrat Presidential candidates Clinton and Obama for declaring their intention to reopen NAFTA, which of course sent shock waves through our two huge export markets -- Canada and Mexico, our NAFTA partners. Candidate Clinton's protests seem especially ironic, considering then-President Clinton's full-court press to pass NAFTA in 1993. His tenacity and arm-twisting garnered some 100 House Democrats' votes in the process.

On Sunday, the always-thoughtful (but not always right) Sebastian Mallaby had a similar piece entitled, "Democrats Off Course on Trade."  Taking issue with the candidates' promise to reopen NAFTA, Mallaby said:

 "But it's one thing for Democrats to call for a timeout on negotiating new trade treaties and another to threaten violence to existing ones. During last Tuesday's debate, Obama and Clinton both promised to reopen the North American Free Trade Agreement, infuriating Canada and Mexico and puncturing the Democratic claim to be less unilateralist than Bush. Moreover, the Democrats' anti-trade rhetoric has become so vitriolic that it is setting the stage for an attack on the World Trade Organization, the most significant addition to the international system since the end of the Cold War."

 "The pity is," Says Mallaby in conclusion, "that the Democrats didn't have to go this way. It's not that difficult to explain that U.S. manufacturing output has gone up, not down: It simply isn't true that production has been shifted en masse to Mexico or even China. Manufacturing employment has fallen not because of trade but because of technological progress." And he's right -- manufacturing output in 2007 was at an all-time high, besting the second-best year on record, 2006. Productivity in manufacturing has soared -- in part because the manufacturing sector is a voracious consumer of technology.

"Truth," goes the adage, "Is the first casualty of war." It seems that in the Democrats' battle for Ohio, some stubborn facts about NAFTA are being lost along the way.