A cause endures: Gephardt is out. Is protectionism in?

RICHARD GEPHARDT's quest for the Democratic presidential nomination is over, and so, apparently, is his political career. But one key element of his message continues to reverberate within his party.

While Howard Dean tapped the antiwar sentiment among Democrats, Gephardt tried to mine resentment against international trade. In his stump speeches, he blamed trade for most of America's perceived and real economic ills. He hammered home the fact that, in contrast to his rivals, he opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) bill that ushered China into the World Trade Organization. It's a message that, at least before the Iowa caucuses on January 19, seemed to resonate with many blue-collar union members.

No one could accuse Dick Gephardt of an eleventh-hour conversion to the protectionist gospel. The 14-term Missouri congressman has been preaching and practicing it for years. Back in the 1980s, he championed an amendment that would have imposed sanctions on countries that ran bilateral trade surpluses with the U.S. He not only opposed but led the charge in the House against NAFTA, PNTR with China, and trade-promotion authority (a.k.a. "fast track").

Gephardt wrapped his pronouncements against trade in near-apocalyptic language. The U.S. trade deficit "is both an American crisis and a global tragedy." U.S. multinational companies are aiding and abetting a global "race to the bottom" in which they "have thrown morality to the winds and sought out those countries where exploitation knows no bounds."

While his own bid failed, the former House Democratic leader won converts among his rivals. He justifiably bragged that the other candidates were sounding more like Dick Gephardt with each passing debate. Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts voted for NAFTA, China PNTR, and trade-promotion authority, but he has now pledged to veto agreements that do not enforce strict labor and environmental standards on less developed countries (a poison pill that would preclude any new agreements). Howard Dean backed NAFTA when he was governor of Vermont, but now says he wants to renegotiate the deal to toughen standards. Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, who has a mixed voting record, has sounded harsher in his criticisms of free trade. Wesley Clark, a blank slate on trade, has adopted the tougher-standards mantra. Only Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut has defended the free-trade tradition, warning his fellow Democrats that protectionism would harm the U.S. economy and cost jobs in export-oriented farm states such as Iowa.

Gephardt chided his rivals for supporting "a trade policy that's exactly like George Bush's," skipping over the irony that what he really opposed were Bill Clinton's trade policies. After all, NAFTA and China PNTR, the two main targets of Gephardt's fire, were pushed through Congress by President Clinton. While Clinton had his lapses from free trade (as has his successor), he championed it rhetorically and delivered some genuine victories. Gephardt and the rest of the protectionist pack seem to have forgotten the pro-trade element in the centrist platform of the only Democrat to win two terms in office since Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In supporting trade, it is Bill Clinton and Joe Lieberman who represent "the Democratic wing of the Democratic party." In the days of FDR and John F. Kennedy, Democrats were the ones who understood that trade keeps prices down for working families by keeping competitive pressure up on domestic producers. It was Democrats such as Secretary of State Cordell Hull who turned our nation away from the disastrous protectionist policies of the 1930s and embraced trade as a tool of foreign policy. In the aftermath of World War II, trade spread hope to war-torn Europe and Japan, helped knit together a peaceful Western Europe, and helped cement the Cold War alliance.

Today, trade remains our best hope for spreading prosperity to a wider circle of mankind. Trade promotes growth in developing countries, reducing poverty and raising labor and environmental standards. Contrary to Gephardt's "exploitation" charge, U.S. multinationals prefer to invest in countries where the infrastructure works, markets are open, and workers are educated and able to buy the products they make. That's why most outward U.S. direct investment flows to Canada and Western Europe, and only a trickle to India, Haiti, and sub-Saharan Africa. Developing countries that open themselves to trade are also more likely to open their political systems and protect human rights.

At home, trade raises the productivity of American workers and lowers prices at the store, allowing working families to enjoy a higher standard of living. The economic boom of the 1990s that the Democrats claim they want to replicate was also a period of rising trade, including imports, and growing U.S. integration into the global economy. NAFTA and the Uruguay Round Agreements that created the WTO helped to spur the rise in U.S. productivity that fueled the low-inflation expansion.

Another irony for the anti-trade Democrats is that America's remaining trade barriers are cruelly if unintentionally aimed at products disproportionately made and consumed by poor people. Those U.S. trade barriers the Democrats want to spare from future trade agreements aren't aimed typically at products made in other rich countries but at those made and grown in the world's poorest countries. And those same products--food, clothing, textiles, shoes--represent a big chunk of the budgets of poorer families here at home. Recent studies by the pro-trade Progressive Policy Institute, the New Democrat think tank, found that a poor, single mother of two pays an effective tariff rate on the goods she buys that is three times higher than the rate paid by a single executive earning $110,000 a year. American protectionism as it exists today is a steeply regressive tax.

The one apparent chink in Gephardt's anti-trade armor has been his support for the World Trade Organization. Gephardt voted in favor of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act in 1994, and against a failed resolution in 2000 to withdraw the U.S. from the organization. But it now appears he literally did not know what he was voting for.

In an interview in November, Gephardt promised, "When I am president I will ask the WTO to enact an international minimum wage." This proposal is astonishing on at least three counts. First, the WTO itself has zero authority to "enact" anything, never mind a sweeping global minimum wage. It is a membership-driven organization that can enact no new policy without the unanimous agreement of its 148 members, and those agreements are "enforced" only when one member decides to challenge another through dispute settlement. Second, the 80 percent of WTO members that are developing countries would summarily and rightly reject anything smacking of an intrusive "international minimum wage." Like environmental and labor standards, it's a non-starter. Third, the idea would be a recipe for global disaster. Workers in poor countries receive lower wages for a very basic reason: They are less productive. The reason is not that they are incapable or lazy, but that they lack the education, infrastructure, capital, and efficient domestic markets to match rich-country levels of productivity. If companies are forced by law to pay them an hourly wage higher than the value of what they can produce in an hour, no company will hire them. The result would be massive unemployment in poor countries, collapsing demand, and social chaos.

Richard Gephardt's campaign for the presidency ended in Iowa, but will his legacy live on in the Democratic party? If the eventual nominee still sounds like Gephardt on trade, it is unlikely to give him much traction in the general election. For one thing, the steadily improving U.S. economy reduces the value of trade as a bogeyman. For another, protectionism has not sold well on the presidential level since Herbert Hoover's campaign in 1928. Americans may have their misgivings about trade, but it ranks far down their list of issues. Americans expect members of Congress to represent parochial interests, but they also want their presidents to safeguard our broader national interest.

Mr. Griswold is associate director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute.