Senator Clinton fetched up on CNBC yesterday afternoon in hopes of making some political gain out of a slight dip in the stock market, reminding us of how precarious a position it is for a political candidate to be hoping for bad things to happen to the American economy. The senator certainly managed some utterances that were illuminating. Our favorite was when she attributed the 8% slide in the Shanghai stock market, and the attendant decline on worldwide markets, to “rumors of a capital gains tax.”

Well, hot diggity dog. It’s just wonderful to see Senator Clinton concede that raising a capital gains tax causes a decline in the prices of stocks. We’re not so cynical as to attribute this to her husband raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, where the bankers have figured this out. The fact is that the stock market soared after both President Clinton and Speaker Gingrich reduced the capital gains tax to 20% from 28% in 1997 and after President Bush and the Republican Congress in 2003 reduced the capital gains tax even further, to 15%.

If there’s a puzzle here it is that Mrs. Clinton herself voted against the 2003 reduction in the capital gains tax, making it reasonable to wonder, if she were elected president, whether she would restore the higher rate — or even if her election would create “rumors” of such a rate increase, triggering a stock slide. Particularly with Mrs. Clinton also expressing concern, in the same appearance on CNBC, about what she called “a slow erosion of our own economic sovereignty.”

Why, the senator sounded like Patrick Buchanan, the Reform Party crank who spent the years of Bill Clinton’s presidency using that very word — “sovereignty” — to complain that the North American Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, championed by the Clinton administration, were eroding America’s control of its own economy. Or if not Mr. Buchanan, she sounded like Ross Perot or like some protester in the streets during the Seattle World Trade Organization meeting in 1999.

It’s hard to tell whether this was an attempt by Mrs. Clinton to pander for labor union support against Senator Edwards, who is emerging as one of the most dangerous candidates on the left flank. An armchair psychologist would say she was expressing pent-up ill-feelings against Vice President Gore dating to Mr. Gore’s victory over Mr. Perot in the widely watched CNN debate about NAFTA back in 1993. It will occur to some of our readers that 1993 was a long enough time ago that America should have either resolved the debate over free trade or moved on to a new set of political personalities other than the Clintons and Mr. Gore.

Then again, the debate over free trade has simmered in America at least since the British Parliament imposed the Sugar Act of 1764, setting the stage for the Stamp Act and, thus, our Revolution. But if the debate is not new, who has ever seen the wife of a president who championed free trade over protectionist opposition run for the White House on a campaign of carping about how free trade erodes America’s “economic sovereignty.”

If Mrs. Clinton makes it to the White House and actually implements an increase in the capital gains tax and a reversal of the free trade agreements her husband and his trade negotiators worked so hard to craft and pass, our prediction is that Republican politicians appearing on CNBC in the aftermath will have a lot worse damage to talk about than a 3% one-day dip in the major American stock market indices.