Obama Goes Soft on Free Trade

Republican John McCain is a most militantly pro-free trade presidential candidate. That fact, alone, should guarantee his defeat in Ohio and other industrial states where his strategists entertain hopes of surfing a "Reagan Democrat" crossover of working-class Democratic voters to the GOP column this fall.

All that is required is that Barack Obama campaign as a critic of the North American Free Trade Agreement and other deals that have battered workers, farmers, communities and the environment in the US and abroad.