This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, November 8, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

As President Obama couches his visit abroad as one of both jobs and trade, exports anyway,

he does so as a president who doesn't have the best record on trade.

Dan Griswalt, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Trade Policy Studies, says

the president has a new opportunity with this Congress to burnish a new reputation as a free trade president.

The focus of this election really was spending debt to a lesser extent I think Obamacare where did trade fit in as we looked

at this this most recent election there were certainly a number of candidates in the 2010 election who tried to make trade an issue,

starting with the president.

You know, it seemed a stock line of every speech that he was complaining about can almost quote it verbatim

Republicans who support tax breaks for US companies that ship jobs overseas.

It's a very complicated issue having to do with the US tax code. Of course there are perfectly

legitimate reasons why US companies invest abroad. That's increasingly how they're reaching

their customers. But the bottom line is that rhetoric didn't seem to

resonate with voters. It was overwhelmed by these other issues you mentioned

earlier. And also there were a number of candidates who tried to make an issue out of trade, mostly Democrats, but some Republicans.

And there, too, the takeaway is that it didn't seem to make any difference. In fact, there were at least five very high profile races in the industrial Midwest.

The Senate races in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois,

governor's races in Michigan and Ohio,

where the Democratic candidates accused their opponents of favoring trade agreements that were shipping jobs over to China and elsewhere.

All five of them lost.

This is not to say they lost because they brought up trade, but I'm just

...