Mr Bush's steel tariffs have made them even more determined that these trade-remedy rules need to be revised.
The Republican majority in the House, too, may depend on Mr Bush's steel decision: several Republicans from steel districts won narrow victories in 2000.
Yet, although Mr Bush cannot ignore big steel, he need not lapse into protection.
ECONOMIST: Why protecting American steel is such a rotten idea
This brings me to a potential disaster--the Bush Administration's steel import quota.
In March, Mr Bush imposed new tariffs on imported steel from a wide range of countries.
Mr Bush's decision to impose steel tariffs in March 2002 was designed, in part, to curry favour with steel workers.
Bush-era trade quotas on steel demonstrate a secondary effect of trade restrictions.
The EU has also fought off Mr Bush's tariffs on imported steel, which were repealed in December after the World Trade Organisation deemed them illegal.
On Tuesday, Mr Bush was in Pittsburgh, a big steel town and home of the Pittsburgh Steelers football team.
Bush hosted a fund-raiser Monday in the automaking Detroit suburb of Dearborn, Michigan, which felt the sting of tariffs imposed by the Bush administration in early 2002 that hiked steel prices.
Mr Bush may even owe his job to West Virginia's steel workers.
ECONOMIST: Why protecting American steel is such a rotten idea
President Bush is close to agreeing import quotas and tariffs on foreign steel, it says, and the emergency loan could have been secured with the right effort.
Mr Bush's call for duties on a wide range of imported steel products in March remains a highly contentious issue among members of the European Union and the basis for a possible trade war.
Mr Bush's advisers seem to be calculating that, just as steel tariffs may help him to win West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania in 2004, so signing the farm bill may win him votes in the prairie belt.
On Thursday, Mr Bush said he would keep America's system of licensing and monitoring steel imports and he promised to act promptly against any country judged to be selling its steel below cost in American markets.
Regarding global trade, George Bush has painfully learned that protectionism is a loser, both economically (his steel tariffs cost more jobs among steel users than they saved in the steel industry) and politically (those tariffs ended up winning him no favor in Ohio, Pennsylvania or West Virginia).
Economic weakness, especially if it is expressed in rising unemployment, will, however, make the Bush administration even keener to pander to domestic lobbies for trade protection, as it already has for steel and farms.
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