Obama as well as Clinton schwaffle on ‘fair trade’

Obama has said he wants to look at environmental and labor standards in the Doha round of WTO, but given his background, how much does that really mean?

Obama acknowledged in the debate that in his 2004 Illinois Senate campaign, he said — as he put it now — "NAFTA and other trade deals can be beneficial to the United States." His comments, as reported in 2004, were that NAFTA had brought enormous benefits to his state, but that trade deals needed to be made better for workers. …

In his 2004 Senate campaign, he said the U.S. should pursue more deals such as NAFTA, and argued more broadly that his opponent's call for tariffs would spark a trade war. AP reported then that Obama had spoken of enormous benefits having accrued to his state from NAFTA, while adding that he also called for more aggressive trade protections for U.S. workers.

Well, there you go. Don’t expect anything beyond incremental change.