Obama doesn’t look to be backing off from free trade First in a series

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SINCE his election in November, President-elect Barack Obama has worked hard to assemble the team that will take office with him Jan. 20. Starting today, The Oklahoman looks at how Obama’s personnel choices may affect three important issues areas: trade, the American workplace and the environment

Campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, there are indications Obama’s instinct for pragmatism, seen in a number of his Cabinet appointments, will trump ideology when it comes to weighing free trade against protectionism.

Certainly, the argument for free trade is helped by the fact the U.S. economy needs access to every available market right now.

Few economists would agree that isolating this economy from the world — by snubbing countries eager to enter into trade deals with the United States or worse, by erecting new, protectionist tariffs — is a good idea. Smoot-Hawley, the 1930 tariff-raising bill that choked trade with Europe at the depths of the Great Depression, today is considered the very definition of economic policy wrongheadedness.

While Obama used a lot of anti-trade rhetoric during the Democratic primaries, he lowered the volume during the general election campaign and has selected Ron Kirk, the pro-trade former mayor of Dallas, to be the next U.S. trade representative and Bill Richardson, another free-trade supporter, to be commerce secretary.

It’s difficult to predict the course of an administration that hasn’t yet launched, but these appointments, Obama’s apparent detachment from some of the ideological ruts of his own party and his multilateral views on other issues all suggest he isn’t preparing to step the United States back from fair and free global trade.

Almost reflexively, the president-elect promises greater scrutiny of the environmental and labor standards of America’s potential trading partners — to prevent a "race to the bottom.”

Perhaps that will be the excuse for not expanding trade with Colombia and other countries. No question, that’s where some want him to go. "The incoming president will face more political pressure for protectionism than any other U.S. chief executive since 1930,” outgoing Commerce Undersecretary Christopher Padilla recently said. The ghost of Smoot-Hawley!

That pressure will test Obama’s strength. Thanks to an internationalist like Richardson and Kirk, who urged the North American Free Trade Agreement as a conduit for expedited border exchanges with Mexico, he’ll have allies.

Again, with a faltering economy Obama isn’t about to limit the potential for expansion, even if it means irritating Big Labor. Concern for the larger economy is simply more important. So far we’re encouraged because Obama appears to understand that fundamental point.