Saturday Morning Post: The Weekly View from Washington
President Obama’s trade agenda survived its surprisingly rocky debut in the Senate this week. The upper chamber now is primed to approve handing Obama the extra clout he needs to finalize the massive Pacific Rim trade pact. But the big test still looms in a hostile House. We penciled out the House math here earlier this month, and it hasn’t meaningfully budged.
To understand why, consider Adam Smith, a ten-term Democrat representing a largely residential chunk of Seattle and some surrounding suburbs. On paper, Smith’s support should be a slam-dunk. He’s one of 63 House Democrats who voted on the last fast-track bill, back in 2002, and one of only two from that group who supported it. He hails from a trade-dependent state with a heavy concentration of corporate giants rallying for the deal (the headquarters of Amazon, Costco, Microsoft, and Starbucks, among others, surround his district). And in Congress, beyond that 2002 vote, he’s distinguished himself as a pragmatist, including a stint in the leadership of the business-friendly New Democrat Coalition.
Yet Smith remains uncommitted to granting Obama the authority he helped secure for George W. Bush. His skepticism in fact reflects a decade-long drift tracking the national party’s growing wariness of trade accords. Republicans have ousted the staunchest pro-trade Democrats from Southern and border states, while redistricting has pushed survivors elsewhere into more liberal warrens. Smith started registering doubts in 2005, when he opposed the Central American Free Trade Agreement for what he called its insufficient labor protections. Pressure at home has only reinforced the position: His once-centrist district, redrawn in 2012, now leans heavily left. Smith last month sounded like somebody the White House shouldn’t even bother trying to convince. “To our average person out there, [the Trans Pacific Partnership] is another example of how corporations are for the super rich and not average people,” he told the Puget Sound Business Journal. “Does it make sense for CEOs to be making $40 to $50 million a year, when you have people working for you who don’t have health care?”
Say what you will about that logic. But if Obama’s trade push unravels, part of the blame will lie with the administration’s failure to extricate it from the surging populist animus in his own party.
| Tory Newmyer | |
| @torynewmyer | |
| tory_newmyer@fortune.com |
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