The significance of yesterday’s endorsement of Senator Kerry by the AFL-CIO can be summed up as follows: The appeal of the protectionist message that Senator Edwards is peddling is so anemic that not even the AFL-CIO is buying it anymore. Mr. Edwards brought that protectionist message to New York yesterday.”When we talk about trade, we are talking about values,” Mr. Edwards said.”I have seen it with my own eyes what happens when the mill shuts down. It’s devastating when those jobs are gone.” An Edwards press release claimed that the senator from North Carolina opposes not only the North American Free Trade Agreement but also fast track and trade agreements with the Caribbean, Africa, Chile, and Singapore.

Mr. Kerry, in contrast, has been more supportive of free trade. It’s one of the few issues on which he’s to the right of his Massachusetts colleague, Senator Kennedy. Mr. Kerry supported Nafta. As recently as August 1, 2002, Mr. Kerry voted to give President Bush fast-track trade promotion authority, which Messrs. Kennedy and Edwards opposed. On November 3, 1999, Mr. Kerry cast a vote to expand free trade to Africa and the Caribbean; Messrs. Kennedy and Edwards opposed the trade expansion. On June 22, 1999, on a vote on creating protectionist barriers to steel imports to America, Mr. Kerry voted for trade, while Mr. Edwards sided with the protectionists.

By the end of 2002, Mr. Edwards had a 96% lifetime voting record from the AFL-CIO, while Mr. Kerry had a lower, 90% rating, mainly because of trade votes. Mr. Edwards seems to think that the protectionist message is going to take hold. It didn’t work for Rep. Richard Gephardt, who didn’t get either the AFL-CIO’s endorsement or the support of the voters of Iowa.

What the AFL-CIO said yesterday by endorsing Mr. Kerry was that even it doesn’t buy the argument that trade agreements are bad for the economy. At least, it doesn’t buy the argument enough to put the weight of its endorsement behind the proposition. Two unions abstained from the AFL-CIO’s endorsement decision, including the United Auto Workers and Unite, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees. Both unions have seen job losses overseas and to right-to-work states in the American South like Mr. Edwards’s North Carolina. Unite’s position in Democratic politics has deteriorated so badly that even Senator Clinton, wanting to have T-shirts made as a campaign fund raiser, chose a factory in Los Angeles that Unite accuses of union-busting. Evy Dubrow, call your office.

The shift at the AFL-CIO has been going on for nearly a decade now. It ended up backing President Clinton despite his advocacy of free trade. Today’s AFL-CIO is also heavily influenced, at the staff level, by activists that were part of the anti-Vietnam War new left that joined Mr. Kerry in opposing the struggle against worldwide communism — a struggle that was heroically supported by the AFL-CIO under George Meany and Lane Kirkland. Yesterday’s endorsement of Mr. Kerry was one more nail in the coffin of protectionism — but also in the AFL-CIO that once represented industrial, manufacturing workers with a deep interest in spreading freedom around the world.