This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, April 16, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown. Trade policy will loom large in the fall campaign for president.

Sally James, a trade policy analyst at the Cato Institute,

breaks down the candidate's positions.

In general, what characterizes this presidential race in terms of trade positions of the candidates different from previous presidential campaigns?

Well, I'm not sure that it is much different from previous campaigns in the primary part of the race.

Certainly 2004.

John Kerry was kind of speaking out against Benedict Arnold corporations and offshoring and all this sort of thing.

And then of course when the general election came around, just like it's happened in previous

years, they kind of returned to the center, the parties,

when they're campaigning for more independent voters.

But I think what may characterize this presidential campaign when we get down to two candidates,

one from each side, this may stick around for a while, this kind of stark difference in the trade positions of the

candidates simply because we're seeing a slowing of the economy and so far

particularly on the Democratic side in fact almost exclusively on the Democratic side, in fact almost exclusively on the Democratic

side, there's been this push towards blaming trade for a lot of this slowdown or if not

trade, globalization, hedge funds, you know, free capital movement,

that sort of thing.

So we may see that a more stark difference

between the candidates this time and certainly

based on their voting records records they are polls apart.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have both pointed to bad trade agreements and the fact they

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