Politics & Power Quote by Mark Udall

Udall is doing a careful piece of political triage: praising export growth without sounding like he’s signing a blank check for corporate trade deals. The opening clause - “expanding market access for American industry, financial markets and farmers” - reads like a roll call designed to reassure donors, chambers of commerce, and rural constituencies all at once. “Critical” is the tell. It’s a signal that he accepts the basic premise of globalization and competitiveness, not the activist critique that trade itself is the problem.

Then comes the pivot word that matters most in modern trade rhetoric: “responsibly.” It’s deliberately vague, but not accidental. “Responsibly” creates space for regulation, enforcement mechanisms, and political cover in case a deal turns sour. Udall isn’t rejecting growth; he’s asserting that growth has conditions. That’s the subtext: trade agreements should have teeth on labor rights and environmental standards, not just sunny side agreements that can be ignored once the ink dries.

The phrase “accounting for the treatment and protection of workers and the environment” is also a quiet rebuke to the NAFTA-era model, when bipartisan enthusiasm for market access often treated labor and ecological damage as acceptable externalities. Coming from a late-20th-century Democrat with a Western profile, it tracks with a coalition that includes both organized labor and conservation-minded voters. He’s positioning himself between two caricatures - the protectionist and the free-trade purist - and claiming the adult middle: pro-market, but not indifferent to who gets hurt while the market expands.