FAST TRACK'S FAILURE DUE TO NO LEADERSHIP

Last week saw a remarkable event in Washington: the apparent breakdown of the bipartisan, post-World War II consensus favoring free trade. The immediate issue was the question whether to grant to President Clinton fast-track trade authority, the power possessed by every president since Gerald Ford. Fast track means that members of Congress get only one up-or-down vote on trade agreements negotiated by our presidents rather than being able to offer amendments to them. A bipartisan consensus has long held this to be the way to go, given the fact that you can't have 535 negotiators and expect to efficiently reach agreements.

While 160 Republican members of Congress favored the proposal and were prepared to vote to grant this authority to a Democratic president, only a pathetic 42 of 205 House Democrats could be rounded up to support granting it to the president of their party. This will be seen as a milestone in the transformation of the House Democratic caucus into a 1930s-style labor party. In that caucus, the rout of the self-styled Clinton-Gore New Democrats is complete.

Knowing they were nearly 20 votes short, House Republican leaders, in consultation with the president, indefinitely postponed the vote. Given the fact that previous Democratic Congresses have granted this authority to Republican presidents, this was a stunning defeat for the president and may be a portent of more to come.

Remaining in the officially undecided category of 70 or so Republicans was U.S. Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, R-Cape Girardeau. While acknowledging that approval of the issue is vital for such crucial industries as agribusiness and the Procter & Gamble Paper Products Co., Emerson hasn't come down on either side.

"I've been agonizing over the measure," she said last week while attending Veterans Day ceremonies here. "I'm not totally positive about the initiative."

This newspaper unflinchingly supports free-trade measures such as fast track, believing such policies to be no small part of the current prosperity, with its historically low unemployment and the booming financial markets that have enriched so many millions of us. Last week's failure is primarily a failure of presidential leadership, given the fact that Clinton let this authority lapse well over a year ago and did nothing until his recent half-hearted efforts to try to save it. As he and his free-trade allies try to pick up the pieces, there are huge stakes on the line for the American economy in trying to restore the longstanding consensus favoring free trade and more open global markets.