New York Times [Far-Left's Paper of Record]: Obama Will Need His Oratory Powers to Sell Globalization - "dubious assertion that the losses to the American economy from these deals are greater than the benefits" - Right, "dubious," almost hopelessly in debt, entire industries gutted. --tma

WASHINGTON — When President Obama travels to North Carolina and Europe this week, he will press an argument that could define foreign policy in the last six months of his presidency: that Americans and Europeans must not forsake their open, interconnected societies for the nativism and nationalism preached by Donald J. Trump or Britain’s Brexiteers.

Few presidents have put more faith than Mr. Obama in the power of words to persuade audiences to accept a complex idea, whether it is the morality of a just war or the imperfect nature of American society. Yet countering the anti-immigration and anti-free-trade slogans in this election year will require all of his oratorical skills.

Mr. Obama road-tested his pitch over the last two weeks in two friendly venues: Silicon Valley and Canada. This week, he will take the case to North Carolina, a swing state that has been hard hit by the forces of globalization, and to a NATO meeting in Poland, where the alliance members will grapple with the effects of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, known as Brexit.

In Warsaw, Mr. Obama will sit next to Britain’s lame-duck prime minister, David Cameron, whose political career was ended by his miscalculation over holding the referendum on European Union membership. But first, in Charlotte, N.C., he will campaign with Hillary Clinton, his former secretary of state and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who reversed her position on Mr. Obama’s Asian trade deal, formally called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, after many in her party turned sharply against free trade.

“President Obama has made a valiant attempt to build support for freer trade,” said Eswar S. Prasad, a professor of trade policy at Cornell University. “But the arguments in favor of free trade lack rhetorical and political resonance, especially amidst a heated political campaign.”

The case for ambitious trade deals, Dr. Prasad said, is that they allow the United States to set the rules for its dealings with other countries, and to wield greater geopolitical influence. Yet those arguments are easily overshadowed by the simple, if dubious, assertion that the losses to the American economy from these deals are greater than the benefits. ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/world/europe/obama-will-need-his-oratory-powers-to-sell-globalization.html