Jason

I did not realize you were associated General Clark.  I wrote him urging him to run and help host a number of the evenings for him.  It is nice to agree with some who worked so hard for him.

I would not be too depressed.  One of the things I have noticed, and the Republicans do make hay of this, Democrats include traditional liberals, socialists and even those more left.  We all get lumped in as liberals and then that word is used to end all further debate.

Besides trade you should notice that many of the people who like to trade also don't like the whole notion of consumer goods and that fact that Americans like purchasing such goods.  Their option to trade is part of a general dislike of the whole idea behind modern capitalist society.  

p.s. Also, keep in mind, even idiotic comments help you tighten up your arguments, even as they drive you nuts. Sometimes it makes you realize you've got to step back and do a big picture thing, like you did here. If you can find the right point to calm the zealots, it's gotta be a good one. :-) Probably the most mysterious reaction is few comments at all--then you have to wonder, is no one interested, or is it that this argument is so non-inflammatory that it's a sure sell to a majority? :-)

This is an interesting question--although not really the subject of the post.

One of the things that confused the dickens out of me during the Clinton presidency was why he so pissed off people who called themselves conservative. Here was a democrat  who was farthest to the right ("most centrist" if you prefer) than any in the post-war period.  He did a lot of the things they profess to support--controlled deficits, expanded free trade, reined in entitlements for poor people, and so forth.  He didn't actually deliver anything to speak of in advancing an environmental agenda (which I was angry about at the time, but seeing the alternative in action....) and slowed down the movement on divisive social issues ("safe legal and rare" is  a far cry from "just part of a woman's body" while an agenda to advance gay rights didn't last past the first sixty days of the presidency).

I still don't know what pissed them off so much. The only thing I could think is that it was about power, and he was cherry picking their good issues.

Now Bush comes along, and he should be illuminating. He's farther to the left of any Republican president since Nixon--deficit spending to a fare-thee-well, nation-building, increasing the size of government, adding to entitlements, erecting protectionist barriers, intervening for humanitarian reasons internationally, presiding over a period of rapid progressive social reform (read Scalia's dissent in Casey if you don't think things have changed  a lot for the better in this regard)--and the left thinks he's the personification of evil.

Well, I have reasons for thinking the left is correct here. The other stuff Jason mentions, like restructuring the tax code so that unearned income plays a much smaller role while wages bear more of the burden. Gutting environmental policy without changing any laws.  That kind of thing. And there's the whole governance thing; the spending has been wasted, the nation-building has enriched cronies (though that's not exactly a new development), protectionist barriers have been for shareholders, not workers etc.

No, what I don't understand is why the right has stuck with him for so long.   Is it really just about being the ones who get to divide up the money?

Jason - boy is this the wrong question.  Even the "fire-breathing" David Sirota has quite pointedly and prominently given the Clinton administration their props.  Nobody is arguing that Clinton was WORSE than Bush.  The political argument is that he wasn't sufficiently BETTER than Bush so that the people who should have been voting Democratic noticed.

You say we obsess constantly about trade.  I don't see it that way.  As I've said in other posts this morning, I really don't give a damn about tariffs.  What I really object to from "free-trade" Democrats is the parroting of business-school ideology as revered truth.

I'm tired of hearing the bullshit that the only way to survive in this economy is to move up the value chain, as if there's ever been room for everyone at the top.  I don't believe the hype that America can only survive by invention and managing the labor of others.   Computer programmers who are excellent at their jobs are told that they must become managers of offshore teams to keep jobs.  Even if that were possible, it isn't sustainable.  In fewer years than the purveyors of this nonsense imagine, the American managers will be getting thrown out on their asses, just as the the programmers were, as the offshore countries develop their own management cultures - since they will have the seedbed of actual work to grow their management skills on and American managers won't.  The more of this that goes on, the more parasitical America will become.

I favor a well-balanced economy with the proper mix of high and low-skill work and the policies that get us there.  If tariffs help with that I'm for them (but I'm skeptical that they are).

The problem with liberal free-traders is that they're promising benefits that are at best generations out in the future while looking down their nose at those their policies make losers of today. 

The problem with you guys is that you've got one track minds that only see the Econ 101 realities and tone-deaf when it comes to the political realities that are necessary in a democracy.  If you can't look at both, then maybe something's wrong with your theory.  It's not a guide to real-world policy, any more than utopian Marxism was.

You have to drink in the reaction to your policies and come to terms with it, not exclude it from the debate as "ignorance."