This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, January 17, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It's fair to say that the three previous occupants of the White House had better records than

Barack Obama on trade, but that doesn't mean a good trade agenda in 2014, is dead.

Daniel Eekinson, director of the Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, explains.

Under the George H.W. Bush administration, the Uruguay round was advanced almost to its conclusion.

That produced the World Trade Organization.

It was the last completed multilateral trade round

that we've had.

Bill Clinton was there to see it through the URA, the Uruguay Round Agreement,

as was he, he facilitated the conclusion of the NAFTA.

And he tried to get trade promotion authority reinstated for himself,

and he was outward looking.

But he was denied fast track at the end of his tenure primarily because Democrats did not want to give that to him.

George W Bush came into office and launched the Doha round in November 2001.

He completed about a dozen trade agreements, mostly with smaller countries.

But when he left office, there were three agreements that he had completed that that never

passed Congress one with Columbia Korea and Panama and when the Democrats

took control of Congress in January 2007, with two years remaining in Bush's term,

they basically said no more.

We are shifting our emphasis from liberalization to enforcement, and we are not going to even see these

through and in fact President Bush George Bush submitted the Columbia

...