COLUMN RIGHT/ VIRGINIA I. POSTREL : Free Trade Is Bush’s Economic Ace : Job-poor Arkansas’ experience refutes fears of industrial flight to Mexico.

Bill Clinton likes to say that George Bush has no economic plan. But he does--and it’s not the “growth package” that Congress won’t pass. Bush’s real plan for the nation’s economic future is the North American Free Trade Agreement and the vision of international prosperity it represents.

Unfortunately, the President still seems to think that trade is foreign policy, and he barely mentioned NAFTA in his acceptance speech. Bush has found the vision thing and he doesn’t seem to know it.

Trade, like abortion, is a “wedge issue,” one that sharply divides the electorate. The campaign trail is littered with candidates who thought that protectionism would take them to the White House. From Democrats Dick Gephardt and Tom Harkin to Republican Pat Buchanan, trade hawks have found it much easier to attract money than votes.

In free trade, Bush has an issue that can prove Clinton too slick for his own good. During the primaries, Clinton supported NAFTA against such union-backed opponents as Harkin and Jerry Brown. Most of Clinton’s economic advisers, including liberal Harvard professor Robert Reich and the denizens of the centrist Progressive Policy Institute, support freer trade.

But lately, Clinton has adopted a protectionist posture, apparently to placate Democratic congressional leaders, notably Gephardt, and to appease labor and environmental interest groups. He may also be paying greater attention to his more leftist advisers, including Occidental College professor Derek Shearer (the brains behind Tom Hayden’s Campaign for Economic Democracy). These trade hawks see free trade as a threat to American jobs.

But the governor of Arkansas, of all people, should know they’re wrong. If they were right, every job in America would have moved to Arkansas a long time ago.

NAFTA critics say that American workers can’t keep their jobs if they have to compete with Mexican wages. But Arkansas’ 1991 per capita income was a mere $14,753; only West Virginia and Mississippi were lower. Like many Mexicans, many Arkansans are but a generation away from grinding rural poverty, some not even that. They are willing to work hard at unpleasant jobs for low wages.

Unlike Mexico, however, Arkansas enjoys truly free trade with the United States. No quotas or tariffs block Arkansas-made goods or Arkansas-grown crops from flowing freely into Missouri or Michigan, New York or California. Arkansas already shares a common market, language and legal institutions with the industries that will supposedly run south to Mexico when NAFTA goes into effect. But Arkansans can testify that low wages and free trade aren’t enough to vacuum up jobs from more prosperous regions.

There’s a lot more to profitability than low wages; otherwise Bangladesh would rule the business world. There is, first of all, the little matter of productivity. A worker who makes $1 an hour but produces one-tenth as much as a worker making $8 an hour is hardly a bargain. And American workers are, on average, the most productive in the world.

In fact, free trade doesn’t threaten high-wage, high-skill, high-productivity jobs. It creates them by opening markets and attracting foreign investment.

Building the competitiveness of American workers by improving education and training is what much of Clinton’s much-vaunted economic plan, “Putting People First,” is supposedly about. But the plan is weirdly contradictory on trade and foreign investment. In the portions inspired by Clinton’s internationalist advisers, it plugs “lifetime learning” and endorses a free trade pact with Mexico. Yet the plan also panders to protectionists. Its extreme economic nationalism, reminiscent of Buchanan’s campaign rhetoric, goes so far as to call for higher taxes on foreign firms that invest in American plants and facilities--even though they give Americans jobs.

This split suggests another reason trade could prove Bush’s secret weapon--if only he’d use it: As the Republican nominee, he has a mandate to be a free trader. In the primaries, trade marked a major split between Bush and challenger Buchanan. It also marked one of Buchanan’s weak points, driving away free-market conservatives who otherwise preferred Buchanan’s views on taxes and regulation.

The crabbed, anti-market perspective suggested by Buchanan’s newfound protectionism contrasted sharply with the President’s free trade efforts. It made Bush look like the future-oriented visionary. And at the convention, the party presented a unified front, celebrating the international economy in a triumph for Bush’s position. Even Buchanan’s speech contained no calls for protectionism.

The free trade issue lets Bush be principled, pro-growth and pro-change. He can play the statesman as Slick Willie squirms.