Below The Beltway

Back in February and March, and especially when the race for the Democratic nomination made it’s way through states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, Barack Obama was second to none in denouncing the North American Free Trade Agreement and proclaiming his desire to renegotiate some of his terms.

Now, it seems, he’s changed his tune:

WASHINGTON (Fortune) — The general campaign is on, independent voters are up for grabs, and Barack Obama is toning down his populist rhetoric - at least when it comes to free trade.

In an interview with Fortune to be featured in the magazine’s upcoming issue, the presumptive Democratic nominee backed off his harshest attacks on the free trade agreement and indicated he didn’t want to unilaterally reopen negotiations on NAFTA.

“Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified,” he conceded, after I reminded him that he had called NAFTA “devastating” and “a big mistake,” despite nonpartisan studies concluding that the trade zone has had a mild, positive effect on the U.S. economy.

Hmm, isn’t that basically what one of his economic advisers was telling the Canadians during the heat of the campaign ?

Update: James Joyner argues, convincingly, that Obama’s change in position is a good thing:

While politicians should absolutely be called on politically convenient policy maneuvering to both punish them for demagoguery and to ferret out what they really think, it’s far better that they ultimately adopt reasonable positions rather than stubbornly holding to ill-advised pledges. Obama has rightly been criticized for the latter in getting trapped into supporting an “accidental foreign policy” rather than admitting he was too glib in answering a debate question.

There’s a better than even chance this man will be our next president. It is, as Dave Schuler observed on yesterday’s episode of OTB Radio, quite reassuring that he’s amenable to reason.

Alan Stewart Carl agrees:

Personally, I’m glad to see Obama moving away from demagoguery on NAFTA and embracing a more moderate tone. I’m also amused to see The Nation distressed. If they wanted an economic populist, maybe they should have supported Hillary Clinton who all but put on overalls and took a job at a factory.

I think Joyner and Carl have a point.

I remain convinced, as I was back in March, that much of the anti-NAFTA rhetoric that Obama and Clinton were using while campaigning in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania was just that; rhetoric for the masses. However, there is something good about a person, especially a person who very likely will be the 44th President of the United States, who is willing to reconsider his positions on issues.

In a comment to Joyner’s post, Dave Schuler makes this point:

Frankly, I think it’s imprudent for Republicans to chide Obama when his policy preferences evolve in the direction they’d prefer. Inconsistency isn’t necessarily a vice and consistency isn’t necessarily a virtue.

And the willingness to admit you might have been wrong is, sometimes, more admirable than a President with a sometimes stunning inability to admit when they’d made a mistake.