From talking to people here and there, I think there is a pretty strong chance that "fast track"--and, perhaps, even TPP--will be defeated in the House thanks to a left-right alliance. That alliance is nothing new, however. Even if The New York Times has just discovered it.

The Times' Jonathan Weisman, one of the great conveyors of elite conventional wisdom, hails his discovery:

An odd marriage of convenience between liberal Democrats and Tea Party Republicans is squeezing President Obama on his ambitious trade agenda, forcing the White House and top Republicans to fight a two-front war on an international economic effort the president hopes to secure before he leaves office.

An alliance between the likes of Representatives Louie Gohmert and Dana Rohrabacher — two of the House’s most conservative members — and Rosa DeLauro and Louise Slaughter — ardent liberals — is unlikely enough. But as the political fringes expand on each end, they are challenging another strange-bedfellows alliance between Mr. Obama and Republicans like Representative Paul D. Ryan and Senator Orrin G. Hatch, who have joined together in a push to secure “fast-track” trade promotion authority before the administration completes a major trade agreement with 12 partners along the Pacific Rim.

And:

The new breed of populist conservatives who have come to the House since the 2010 Tea Party wave are less enamored of the pitches of Wall Street and big business, on issues like reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank and raising the gasoline tax to fund the rebuilding of the nation’s infrastructure.

The White House understands that trade promotion authority will be a tough sell with Democrats. Instead, the president’s strongest supporters include two men he has frequently battled: the House speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio, and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader.

But even as most liberal Democrats have become disenchanted with the trade agenda advocated by a variety of American business interests, it is the erosion of support in the rank-and-file right that has Mr. Obama sweating the most. In 2002, the last time Congress approved such authority, the House passed it by a bare majority, 215 to 212, with 190 Republicans carrying the load, and only 27 Democrats coming along for the ride.

The alliance goes all the way back to NAFTA. If you look at the vote here, you can see that the negative votes included 156 Democrats, 43 Republicans and 1 Independent (that was, of course, Bernie Sanders when he served in the House). To be clear, the Republican votes were largely from what we generally refer to as "conservatives" who have been mostly horrendous on virtually every other issue. On this issue, they saw NAFTA in sometimes weird ways--an attack on U.S. sovereignty by a global conspiracy.

In other ways, they saw NAFTA pretty accurately--opposition from Republican southern members who hailed from textile dependent regions who said NAFTA would be a death-knell for those jobs, a position which brought them into alliance with more "liberal" members who also campaigned against NAFTA based on the accurate view that these so-called "free trade" deals would kill tens of thousands of jobs that would evaporate and reappear in Mexico, and, eventually, in Asia.

The point to see is that, like opposition to Wall Street, the opposition to so-called "free trade" has resonance among a slice of people that is broader than a narrow prism of what we view in politics. I think if Bernie Sanders runs, that's what he is counting on and will try to appeal to.

[everyone: first post here, on the run at airport, so if it's weirdly formatted, feel free to fix, adminstrators!]