It was predictable that the race for the Democratic nomination for the 2008 presidential election would include a round of China-bashing. But it is still depressing to hear the fluency of the attacks on all kinds of painfully negotiated free-trade deals to which all the candidates raised themselves in this week’s debate. None of it is in the interest of the United States.

All right, you have to allow that the seven candidates were speaking to a blue-collar, union audience on Tuesday night in Chicago. They knew that the only cheers would be for attacks on China, the World Trade Organisation and the North American Free Trade Agreement. But the extent to which they were prepared to court that audience shows how popular trade-bashing rhetoric is across the country (and in Congress).

President Bush, a steady advocate of free-trade principles since his time as Governor of Texas, is all that stands between Congress and a raft of Bills attacking China that it would like to pass.

It would be hard, after Tuesday night, to call Hillary Clinton a moderate, or centrist, on these issues. “I do not want to eat bad food from China,” she said, referring to recent scandals about ingredients of imports, “or have my children having toys that are going to get them sick.” (A strained choice of words for someone with one adult child.) She is right that the alarms about the quality of food and toy imports from China have produced an immediate clamour for something to be done. Of all the reflexes that might be grouped under the heading “China-bashing”, this has the most justification.

But her call to “be tougher on China going forward”, including — without saying how — “dealing with” what she asserts is their “currency manipulation”, is a populist gesture.

She was hardly alone in Chicago. Senator Barack Obama, close behind her in many assessments of the race for the Democratic nomination, was cooler, by a fraction, saying that “China is a competitor, but they don’t have to be an enemy”.

Senator Joe Biden, one of the august figures among Democrats on Capitol Hill, often thought to be too wonkish to have popular appeal, struck the most technical note with the allegation that the Chinese “hold the mortgage on our house”, supporting American debt, and all candidates promptly rushed to turn this into an attack on Iraq spending.

John Edwards, a former vice-presidential candidate, picked human rights and children’s toys for his lines of attack on China. Bill Richardson, the Governor of New Mexico, chose human rights and “fooling around with currency”, and managed to slide in Darfur. Representative Dennis Kucinich, a perpetual also-ran, avoided any technical point, announcing only that his “most favoured nation” was America, and that the myth that if you dug a deep hole you would get to China had come true. Senator Christopher Dodd made an intelligent but inarticulate call for more openness in Chinese markets.

The China question proved to be a good way of exposing the candidates’ widely varying abilities to talk about technical, foreign questions. But they were all agreed that there were votes in trying to reset the terms of Chinese trade with the US (and rewrite the Nafta trade pact with Canada and Mexico into the bargain).

Bush has made clear that he intends to veto the several Bills that may emerge from Congress ordering China to revalue its currency, among other measures. He is right to do so. Their advocates have failed to make the case that the US has suffered great injury, or that their proposals would have the restorative effect that they claim.

For the moment, the versions making their way through the Senate do not appear to be within reach of the majority needed to override a presidential veto, and so the heat of the issue has dissipated.

Bush’s support for free trade, and conviction of the rapid and wide benefits of such deals dates from his governorship of Texas. Saying no to the China-bashing may be the most valuable move he makes in the rest of his presidency.

(Debate transcript from Federal News Service at fnsg.com)

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