Today’s Wall Street Journal contains two must-read pieces: a front-page article titled “Republicans Grow Skeptical on Free Trade” by John Harwood, and an important opinion piece, “Modern Heroes” by Atlantic correspondent and Naval Academy professor Robert D. Kaplan. Harwood discusses the apparent “broadening resistance to globalization” and “fraying of Republican Party orthodoxy on the economy.” A recent WSJ/NBC poll shows that 60 percent of Republicans believe free trade has been bad for the United States, and 48 percent favor “some tax increase to fund health care and other priorities.” This news does not bode well for the Republican party, as the top Republican presidential contenders are promoting free trade and lower taxes. Harwood quotes Giuliani, who said, “Our philosophy has to be not how many protectionist measures can we put in place, but how do we invent new things to sell…What [protectionists] are trying to do is lock in the inadequacies of the past.” This poll is not only bad news for the GOP, but for the economy, as well, if you ask bloggers. Rod Dreher at Crunchy Con says, “The populist impulse is surging through the GOP, it seems.” And Harvard economist Greg Mankiw agrees, noting, “the populists are winning.” MSNBC’s blog First Read has some interesting analysis of the poll, and notes, “It’s possible the recent recalls from China regarding toys, in particular, had a major effect on the results.” But CNBC notes that “the same poll indicated that few GOP voters would base their vote on economic policies.” Reihan Salam, writing at Ross Douthat’s blog, also dissects the article: “Unfortunately, the current US trade agenda is increasingly more about imposing our (insane) intellectual property rules on the rest of the world and less about lowering our own trade barriers.” But Instapundit put it best, I think, when he wrote, “A general opposition to free trade will be terrible for the U.S. — and the global — economy. I hope that this anti-free-trade sentiment is aimed only at new agreements, and doesn’t extend to a rollback of existing free trade, but I’m not that optimistic.” Also, be sure to check out Kaplan’s analysis of media coverage of troops. He asks, “Why aren’t there more accounts of what the troops actually do?” He also makes the point that “media frenzies are ignited when American troops are either the perpetrators of acts resulting in victimhood, or are victims themselves. Meanwhile, individual soldiers daily performing complicated and heroic deeds barely fit within the strictures of news stories as they are presently defined.” Jules Crittenden has a great post about the piece.
