John McCain demonstrated the global reach of America’s presidential election last night by flying to Colombia where he will once more declare his support for the free-trade deals opposed by Barack Obama.

The Republican nominee claims that Mr Obama’s promise to embrace the rest of the world is contradicted by his populist rhetoric pandering to US trade unions and Rust Belt voters who blame trade deals for the loss of industrial jobs.

Opinion polls suggest that two thirds of US voters believe their economy has suffered from globalisation and, speaking before his visit to Latin America, which will also include a stop in Mexico, Mr McCain said that he had a “very tough” task in convincing the electorate that trade can help them.

He cited the example of President Hoover, whose 1930 decision to sign sky-high tariff legislation into law had ensured “we went from a recession into one of the great depressions of our history”. Mr McCain added: “You gotta stand on principle. I believe in the principle of free trade.” Mr Obama, described by the McCain campaign as “the most protectionist candidate that the Democratic Party has ever fielded”, is planning his own international tour of Europe and the Middle East this summer.

But he has opposed trade deals with Colombia and South Korea, while also pledging to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) signed with Mexico and Canada during President Clinton’s Administration, which most economists believe made America and the world richer. As he headed into critical primaries in industrial states such as Ohio he sought to tie Hillary Clinton to Nafta by saying “entire cities have been devastated” by a deal signed by her husband that, he claimed, had destroyed one million jobs.

When Austan Goolsbee — one of his advisers — was quoted in leaked documents saying that such comments were “more reflective” of political manoeuvring than policy, there were angry denials from Mr Obama’s campaign. He also recently supported a farm Bill that critics have described as a monument to protectionism.

The World Trade Organisation is scrambling this month to make one last effort to complete the long-stalled Doha Round of talks, designed to boost international commerce by hundreds of billions of dollars, before President Bush leave office.

In the weeks since clinching the Democratic nomination, however, Mr Obama has taken a much more nuanced stance on trade. Asked by Fortune magazine to clarify his remarks on Nafta, he replied: “I think that sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified. Politicians are always guilty of that, and I don’t exempt myself.”

Mr Obama no longer seeks, as he once did, to “use the hammer of potential opt-out” to renegotiate the deal but merely a dialogue for “figuring out how we can make this work for all people”. In a speech in the economically blighted Michigan last month he criticised those who want to “build a fortress around America”.

His campaign now talks of relatively minor tweaks to Nafta to improve its environmental and labour standards that would make it more acceptable to US public opinion.

Travellers' tales

69 number of countries Mr McCain's aides say he has visited

5 the number of countries Mr Obama will visit this month

Source: Times archives

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