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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (244921)	4/8/2008 1:13:29 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793782

The New Liberal Taboo April 8, 2008; Page A20 What a spectacle. It is now respectable for Democrats to assert, even to welcome, military defeat (see here). But if a Presidential campaign functionary so much as hints at support for free trade, he's banished to policy exile. That's the meaning of Sunday's sacking of strategist Mark Penn from Hillary Clinton's campaign. In his noncampaign job with a PR firm, Mr. Penn had met with Colombia's ambassador to the U.S. to discuss the free trade agreement that President Bush sent to Congress yesterday. When word of that meeting leaked to a Wall Street Journal reporter last week, big labor went bonkers and Mrs. Clinton gave him the heave-ho despite more than a decade of loyal service. Maybe if Mr. Penn had called General David Petraeus a con man, he'd still have a job. Mr. Penn's dismissal follows the previous humiliation of Barack Obama's economics adviser, Austan Goolsbee, for telling Canadian diplomats that Mr. Obama's anti-Nafta talk was merely campaign jive. Mr. Goolsbee has since all but entered the witness protection program. The grownups in both campaigns realize that free trade is good for the country, yet they must take a vow of public silence. As recently as the 1990s, Bill Clinton's support for free trade was seen as a sign of his economic centrism and that he understood global competitive realities. In the 2008 campaign, free trade has become the primary Democratic taboo.