Unhappy camping

Fortune magazine has a pretty revealing blow by blow of Thursday's deal.

• Rangel thinks he can pull "more than 100" Democratic votes to his side.
• Levin was the last to sign off on the deal, and he was only called in on Thursday afternoon.
• On Thursday midday, Schwab describes senior Dem's maneuvers as taking the "balance of happy and unhappy campers." Fortune reports: "In the end, there were enough happy campers to announce a deal from Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office."
• The Bush administration firmly believes Fast Track is just around the corner: "The real key is that we have created the path to move ahead and get fast track," said Schwab.

This is the first press account to show how really premeditated this deal was. Given the reaction of labor and other groups that we've blogged about, you gotta think a lot of us weren't even told about the camping trip.

Elsewhere, Peter Goodman in The Washington Post takes stock of the universal opposition to this deal from Democratic constituency and even small business groups. (Although he wrongly says that the deal got "labor backing" from John Sweeney. I see no endorsement here.) His summary?

Taken as a whole, the response to the deal, the highest-profile cooperation between the two parties since the Democrats captured Congress in November, underscored how trade is likely to remain a volatile and divisive issue heading into next year's presidential election.

Yeah, and it's likely to be a very harmful issue for the Democrats' re-election prospects. You pretty much can't kick your number one "get out the vote" constituency and expect to come out the better for it.