The Myth of the Responsive Politician?

The Economist's reliably bad Lexington column reviews Bryan Caplan:

The public's anti-foreign bias is equally pronounced. Most Americans think the economy is seriously damaged by companies sending jobs overseas. Few economists do. People understand that the local hardware store will sell them a better, cheaper hammer than they can make for themselves. Yet they are squeamish about trade with foreigners, and even more so about foreigners who enter their country to do jobs they spurn. Hence the reluctance of Democratic presidential candidates to defend free trade, even when they know it will make most voters better off, and the reluctance of their Republican counterparts to defend George Bush's liberal line on immigration.

It's worth noting, however, that absolutely all of the Democratic candidates are proposing policies that would result in very high levels of foreign trade. Dennis Kucinich has by far the most radical view on this matter and wants us to withdraw from multilateral trade pacts and "go back to bilateral trade conditioned on human rights, workers' rights, and the environment." Such a policy would, it seems, entail essentially unrestricted importation of goods from Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan plus maybe a few other places.

And, needless to say, Dennis Kucinich isn't going to be president. The most trade-skeptical positions I've heard outlined suggest either that there should be no new trade deals until a larger welfare state is established, or else that no new trade deals should be signed unless they include rigorous labor and environmental standards. Perhaps this would lead to a situation in which President X presides over an administration that implements no new trade deals whatsoever. Even were that to happen, the US economy would still be substantially more open to foreign imports than it was 15 years ago before NAFTA or the Uruguay Round of GATT.

For that to be the case, either the public must not actually have an especially strong "anti-foreign" bias or else the political system is already highly insensitive to public opinion. Were Caplan's vision of a country at the mercies of irrational voters closer to the mark, surely we should expect a Kucinich boom as he's actually proposing a reduction in the volume of foreign trade.