Like a breath of fresh air

This is what we’ve been waiting for. Unlike others, we resisted taking shots at the President for grinning it up with Hugo Chavez, graciously sitting through the rants of Daniel Ortega and the one-way book swap with Raul Castro at the Conference of Americas, last weekend because in that crowd, who was he supposed to be hanging with? Oh yeah, this guy….

Having listened to Uribe, (and that must have been a nice dose of sanity after enduring 50 minutes of ravings from Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, or weird conspiracy theories by Bolivia's Evo Morales), Obama then seemed to realize that the long-stalled Colombia free trade agreement should have been passed yesterday.

The president announced that his team must find a way to pass the agreement. With world trade down 80%, the pact opens new markets to the U.S. He demanded immediate action, asking Colombia's trade minister to fly to Washington this week.

Then it got even better: Obama invited Uribe to the White House and promised to visit Colombia himself, allowing the Colombians to lay out for him their vast economic and social progress, and their desire to integrate into global trade.

Good on the President. This is an outstanding first step and we sincerely hope he follows through on this. Let’s see, however, how he fares with a Congress that opposed free trade with Columbia on no other discernable grounds than it was pushed by President Bush. And let’s see what how he responds to any initial pushback from his own party in Congress.