Grading the candidates on trade

The Cato Institute has a new handy-dandy website: “Free Trade, Free Markets: Rating the Congress,” in which you can grade members of Congress on their attitudes towards trade barriers and trade subsidies. Just for kicks, I figured it would be worth seeing how the presidential candidates stack up: Hillary Clinton: interventionist (votes in favor of ...

By , a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

The Cato Institute has a new handy-dandy website: "Free Trade, Free Markets: Rating the Congress," in which you can grade members of Congress on their attitudes towards trade barriers and trade subsidies. Just for kicks, I figured it would be worth seeing how the presidential candidates stack up: Hillary Clinton: interventionist (votes in favor of barriers and subsidies); John McCain: free trader (opposes both barriers and subsidies) Barack Obama: never met a subsidy he did not like[So where's your Obama love now?--ed. This would seem difficult to rebut. The only caveat on Obama's score is that the support of subsidies is based on a whopping two votes -- so we're talking small sample size. Otherwise, Ohio and Pennsylvania should love both the Democratic candidates. UPDATE: Thanks to the anonymus commenter who linked to Lael Brainard's January 2008 Brookings brief that compares the major candidates on trade. There's not much difference at all between the two analyses.

The Cato Institute has a new handy-dandy website: “Free Trade, Free Markets: Rating the Congress,” in which you can grade members of Congress on their attitudes towards trade barriers and trade subsidies. Just for kicks, I figured it would be worth seeing how the presidential candidates stack up:

Hillary Clinton: interventionist (votes in favor of barriers and subsidies); John McCain: free trader (opposes both barriers and subsidies) Barack Obama: never met a subsidy he did not like

[So where’s your Obama love now?–ed. This would seem difficult to rebut. The only caveat on Obama’s score is that the support of subsidies is based on a whopping two votes — so we’re talking small sample size. Otherwise, Ohio and Pennsylvania should love both the Democratic candidates. UPDATE: Thanks to the anonymus commenter who linked to Lael Brainard’s January 2008 Brookings brief that compares the major candidates on trade. There’s not much difference at all between the two analyses.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

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