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BUMP!

Precisely. Great post!

It was conservative BASE anger at the President for his continual back-stabbing. Not to be lost in the White House's furious spinning over the Illegal Alien AMNESTY issue...Notice the TRADE issue also cut deeply against him:

The Washington Post had an article the other day that touched upon a very interesting result of the recent election.

Looking at the Democrats who picked up formerly Republican House seats, Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch tallies 27 who defeated (or replaced resigning) free-trade Republicans and who campaigned against the kind of trade deals that Congress has ratified.

That's 27 out of the 29 Democratic pickups just a year after the GOP Congress passed CAFTA in a midnight vote.
The last time Congress had such a dramatic shift in power was 1994 when the Democrats were swept from power after labor union members abandoned the party a year after they passed NAFTA. In 2000 The Democrats failed to win a shoe-in presidency shortly after endorsing MFN status for China.
There is a trend emerging here, and it seems to reach beyond traditional party lines.
So the questions are:

1) Who is opposing these trade agreements?
2) Why do they oppose the trade agreements?

The biggest opposition among Republicans came from textile producing states in the south, sugar-producing states like Louisiana and Idaho and old-line manufacturing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Now let's compare this to where the turnover in Congress was.
In North Carolina, Democrat Heath Shuler -- ostensibly one of the new conservative Democrats -- attacked his opponent, Republican Charles Taylor, for backing off his commitment to vote against the Central American Free Trade Agreement. "It's not right when Congress passes trade bills that send our jobs overseas," said one Shuler ad.
The Democratic pickups -- Missouri's Claire McCaskill, Montana's Jon Tester, Ohio's Sherrod Brown, Pennsylvania's Bob Casey, Rhode Island's Sheldon Whitehouse and Virginia's James Webb -- all unseated free-trade incumbents with campaigns that stressed the need to pay far greater attention to the downward leveling that globalization entails.
That should explain all you need to know - the opposition is from working people afraid for their jobs.

Rhetoric vs. Reality
There is no shortage of politicians and media outlets who will tell you that free trade agreements are a "win-win" proposition, and that they will create more jobs than they will destroy.

Bush said CAFTA would boost textile and other U.S. manufacturers by eliminating tariffs on many American goods imported by Central American nations. Also, he said, the measure would help stabilize the democratic governments in the region by increasing U.S. trade, which he said would make Central American workers more prosperous. "It's a pro-jobs bill," Bush said. "It's a pro-growth bill. It is a pro-democracy bill."

But is that true?
What isn't well known is that CAFTA isn't simply a matter of dropping tarrifs.

Chief among the objections offered by NASDA and many other CAFTA critics is the fact that the supposed "free trade" agreement would impose what amounts to unilateral trade disarmament on U.S. agricultural producers. The six foreign nations included in the pact would be granted immediate access to U.S. food markets. However, U.S. producers would have to wait for years, or even decades, in order to be granted reciprocal access.

Since CAFTA was modelled after NAFTA (with today being the anniversary of the House passing it), it's fair to compare the two. How has NAFTA effected the U.S. economy in the last 16 years?

Since the passage of [NAFTA], the United States has lost half of its textile mill jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Despite predictions that NAFTA would create 170,000 American jobs in just the first two years, Congress set up the NAFTA-TAA (Trade Adjustment Assistance) program for displaced workers. Between 1994 and the end of 2002, 525,094 specific U.S. workers were certified for assitance under this program. Since then NAFTA-TAA has merged with the general TAA, making it harder to track job losses.