Trade in the Minnesota Senate Race: Coleman, Franken, and Barkley

First term incumbent Republican Senator Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken (the comedian) are neck and neck in Minnesota:

Republican incumbent Norm Coleman has inched ahead of Al Franken in Minnesota’s hotly contested U.S. Senate race, with the introduction of a third-party candidate having virtually no impact on the contest so far.

Coleman, who is seeking a second term in the Senate, is ahead of Franken, a TV comedy writer and longtime Democratic activist, by a statistically insignificant one percentage point, 48% to 47%, according to the latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of voters in the state.

The third party candidate, polling 3%, is the Independent Party's, Dean Barkley.  Barkley is a former U.S. Senator, appointed to the Senate by Jesse Ventura after Paul Wellstone died. 

Coleman has a pretty good record on opposition to trade barriers, but he's a sucker for a subsidy.  Here's the Cato Institute summary of his record (In the Cato figure each axis goes from 0% to 100%.  The higher an "X" is along the vertical axis the greater the opposition to subsidies, the further an  "X" is to the right the greater the opposition to trade barriers):

Barkley's tenure in the Senate only lasted from early November 2002 to early January 2003.  He doesn't show up in the Cato Institute's data set.

Franken's trade position, included on his jobs issues; "I’m a fair trader. I’ll insist that our trade agreements include enforceable labor, safety, and environmental standards." 

Franken does discuss free trade in his book Lies and the lying liars who tell them.  The discussion is very brief and depends on assertion: as tariffs drop, and prices for luxury goods do too, jobs move overseas and both domestic workers and foreign workers are left worse off.  He constructs an example in which a foreign worker has a choice of working in terrible conditions, or of becoming a prostitute.  Robert Murphy looks at some of his arguments in this Mises Economics post, Al Franken on Lying Liars, and notes that the example suggests that the foreign worker is actually be better off with the exported job than working as a prostitute. A search on "trade" doesn't bring up other examples in the book. 

Here's a Franken campaign video that addresses trade issues.  He's answering a question that's not caught on the video, but must have been about keeping jobs from being shipped overseas.  He advocates

• ending tax credits for corporations that ship jobs overseas;
• funding for retraining workers who have lost their jobs;
• trade deals shouldn't create race to bottom - this means they should include safety, environmental, and labor protections;
• universal health car to take health care costs off of domestic manufacturers;
• expand tax credits for manufacturers who make cars with higher fuel efficiency so that they stay competitive;
• develop a green energy industry to create domestic green jobs.

Barkley's trade position: "I support fair trade, not free trade that is blind to working conditions and unfair foreign subsidies to their industries."