THE NEW TRADE POLITICS

"I can already hear free-traders sigh. In the long run, they will say, free trade benefits everyone. But in the long run, as John Maynard Keynes once said, we are all dead. In the short run, the growing prosperity gap between investors and employees is altering the American landscape on trade questions...In Tennessee, 71 percent of the voters said that "U.S. trade with other countries" took more jobs from the state; only 12 percent said trade created more jobs. In Virginia the comparable figures were 55 percent and 19 percent."

Say what you will about E.J. Dionne, he tends to have his finger on America's political pulse. And unlike a lot of pundits and columnists, Dionne tends to resist the impulse to talk out of his ass about subjects on which he has no knowledge (unlike many of his cohorts at the Washington Post).