Free market Clintonism, RIP: the death of the free trade democrat.

• Author: Weigel, David
• Position: Hillary Clinton on free trade

HILLARY CLINTON WAS angry about free trade, and she wanted Wisconsin to know it. "I'm tired of being played for a patsy," the candidate said, 48 hours before the state's Democrats would hand a 17-point landslide to Barack Obama. "It's time we said to the rest of the world, 'If you want to have anything to do with our market, you have to play by our rules.'"

That may have been red meat for a hungry crowd in the economically depressed upper Midwest. But Clinton sang the same tune in an interview with the liberal Capital Times newspaper in Madison, railing against a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), one of her husband's most famous economic initiatives.

"It did not fulfill its expectations and caused a lot of consequences that we're going to have to deal with," she told the paper. "I have clearly stated for a number of years that we need to have the kind of pro-American smart trade that comes from looking at the trade agreements we've already passed, evaluating them and revising them so that they're more in keeping with ... the standards that we expect."

The main selling point of Hillary Clinton's campaign, ratcheted up after Barack Obama started scaring her up a ladder, had been her "35 years of experience" along with a certain nostalgia for the 1990S, which both Hillary and Bill smugly described on the campaign trail as having been "pretty good." The linchpin of that claim was the economic boom of the Bill years. Yet last fall Hillary began to soft-pedal or sweep under the carpet the very policies that made the boom possible.

NAFTA was a critical moment in Bill Clinton's presidency, a New Democratic victory over the old union elements of the party. When Clinton signed the final treaties in 1993, he warned that no government action "can change the fact that information can flash across the world, that people can move money around in the blink of an eye." He compared trade skepticism to the ways of old and dying industrial nations: "If we learn anything from the collapse of the Berlin Wail and the fall of the governments in Eastern Europe, [it's that] even a totally controlled society cannot resist the winds of change that economics and technology and information flow have imposed in this world of ours."

As recently as 2006, Hillary Clinton positioned herself as the heir to this trade-accommodating policy. She was not a "die-hard free-trader," she said at the time, but she also wasn't "an unreconstructed protectionist with very...