Bhagwati says Hillary’s worse than Obama:

[W]hereas Mr Obama’s economist is Austan Goolsbee, a brilliant Massachusetts Institute of Technology PhD at Chicago Business School and a valuable source of free-trade advice over almost a decade, Mrs Clinton’s campaign boasts of no professional economist of high repute. Instead, her trade advisers are reputed to be largely from the pro-union, anti-globalisation Economic Policy Institute and the AFL-CIO union federation.

My assumption is that neither candidate would actively promote free trade, so the greater evil is the candidate who can “get things done.” Given Obama’s winning personality, and Hillary’s divisiveness, I’m fairly confident that Hillary would do less harm. She may want moderately worse policies, but she’d have a lot more trouble getting others to go along with her. (In fact, I suspect that most Republican protectionists would start defending NAFTA just to spite her!) At minimum, Obama would have a one-year honeymoon period to do harm; Hillary would be lucky if her honeymoon lasted a week.

Oh well, as long as Obama doesn’t turn out to be the next FDR, I’ll count myself and the world lucky.

HT: Mankiw.