A senior economic adviser to Sen. John Kerry recently sought to calm fears that the Democratic presidential candidate might be forced by his campaign rhetoric to adopt "protectionist" trade policies if he wins the White House.

Alan Blinder, a Princeton University professor, said Kerry's 20-year record in the US Senate shows that he has never voted against a trade agreement. Kerry's recent broadsides against "Benedict Arnold" companies that replace US workers with foreign ones don't diminish that record, he said.

"John Kerry is often - especially by some of my colleagues in economics - accused of at least making noises like a protectionist," Blinder said in a debate organized by the Council on Foreign Relations. "Now making noises is one thing. But if you look at what he's actually saying, there's nothing really protectionist in it."

Blinder was debating Lawrence Lindsey, a former top economic adviser to President George W. Bush who said the key question for economic policymakers over the next four years will be "how to handle globalization." Both Lindsey and Nancy Roman, a council official who moderated the debate, argued that Kerry would have a hard time expanding free trade because of his campaign rhetoric.

"Senator Kerry did not just say he would review all trade agreements," Lindsey said. "He also said he would vote against NAFTA if it came up today. He also said our policies with regard to China were much too open, and he also used the phrase 'Benedict Arnold corporations' to describe corporations that are doing business abroad. That may be all hot air - and hopefully he won't have the opportunity to make it anything but hot air - but I still think that is a fairly protectionist agenda."

Blinder, a former Federal Reserve vice chairman who also advised the Gore campaign in 2000, said Kerry's trade policies aren't likely to differ much from those of the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton.

"A lot of people thought Bill Clinton sounded protectionist in the 1992 campaign against George Bush the first," Blinder said. "He turned out to be the biggest promoter of trade that we've had in this country in a generation or more. I think that comes closer to the model that we'd be more likely to see in a Kerry administration than a protectionist model."

Blinder said the Democratic Party tends to be less enthusiastic about free trade than the Republican Party, making it difficult for any president to win Congressional authority to negotiate trade agreements. "Regrettably, for me, from the point of view of my party...there are more supporters of these trade agreements in the Republican Party than there are in the Democratic Party," he said. "You have to cobble together enough Democrats and enough Republicans to do it."

Unlike Bill Clinton, the current President Bush managed to win that authority - but Blinder argued that Bush has done little with it. "Trade agreements under this authority have been concluded with 12 small countries amounting to 7% of US exports," he said. He said the US International Trade Commission has characterized the economic benefits of those agreements as "negligible" for the nation as a whole. (Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)