>Three times in the last 24hrs I've seen some horrid member of the
>govt here waxing lyrical about great GWB will be for Australia. Why:
>something about trade, of course. The event was uniformly described
>as 'the election of a conservative government in the United States'
>-- so I thought you'd like to know that some people could see a
>difference.
It's kind of surreal. Clinton gets NAFTA and the WTO through Congress, which a Republican president might have had a harder time doing, and devotes his economic agenda to promoting product and financial market openings around the world, and he gets no credit for it from the free traders. Bush comes from a party with a substantial nativist/isolationist wing, and no one even notices. Perceptions are funny things.
Doug