In the past, Clinton has said that she uses a balancing test in assessing trade legislation. "I look at each agreement in its totality and measure the impact of each agreement on the New Yorkers that I am privileged to represent," she said in July 2004, as she voted in favor of the Australia Free Trade Agreement.
Since 2001, Clinton has consistently said the promise of more jobs and greater economic growth has persuaded her to support trade agreements. While campaigning for the Senate a year earlier, Clinton said that she also supported normalized trade relations with China.
But as a presidential candidate, she has adopted a very different tone.
"We're going to take a look at every single trade agreement we've got and we're going to make those trade agreements pro-America and pro-American worker," Clinton recently said at a rally in Muncie, Ind., a onetime industrial hub where thousands of jobs have been lost in recent decades.
Clinton has criticized pending deals with South Korea, Panama and Colombia, which labor groups have singled out for tolerating violence against labor organizers.
She has pledged to call a "time-out" on any more trade pacts until the effect of current agreements can be assessed.
And she has promised to renegotiate specific parts of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was signed during the administration of President Clinton, her husband. The senator has said that she opposed NAFTA while she was first lady.
Since her election to the Senate in 2000, Clinton at times has demonstrated a similar concern about the negative effects of liberalizing trade.
She opposed granting President Bush "fast-track" authority to negotiate trade deals. And she was among 45 senators, including Obama, who voted against the Central American Free Trade Agreement, or CAFTA, in 2005.
"I cannot support an agreement that fails to include adequate labor standards," Clinton said in a speech on the Senate floor at the time.
Twice in the last two years, Clinton submitted legislation requiring studies on the impact of trade agreements on the U.S. economy and labor market. (Both bills were largely ignored; they attracted no co-sponsors and never came up for debate.)
Daniel T. Griswold, who directs the pro-trade Cato Center for Trade Policy Studies, said Clinton's CAFTA vote as well as her support for farm subsidies and other legislation reflect some skepticism about trade.
