Yesterday was a bad day for the big Pacific trade deal as “Senate Democrats blocked consideration of giving President Obama power to accelerate a broad trade accord with Asia, a rebuke that the president helped bring on himself,” the New York Times writes. No, the deal is not dead, but the timing is getting funky with summer almost here — not to mention the political difficulties of the approaching election year. Beyond that, there is a fascinating Democrat vs. Democrat dynamic developing, which the trade troubles reflect. This Politico piece on the party’s internal struggles is amazing:

In the fourth quarter of his presidency, without another race to run, Barack Obama has gone to war with what he sees as an out-of-touch, stuck-in-old-thinking Washington liberal elite — Elizabeth Warren’s the most famous member, but AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka and a coterie of Hill Democrats are up there with her. Obama advisers say the president sees Democratic opponents of his trade agenda as just as detached from reality as Republicans in Congress who held four dozen Obamacare repeal votes or turned raising debt ceilings and fiscal cliffs into government crisis carnivals. … For Obama, there’s a direct connection between bringing the Democratic Party into the 21st century on trade and his sense of himself as ushering in a generationally transformative foreign policy. Aides say Obama views both ideas as pragmatic, dealing with the reality in front of him. Both are about engagement. Both are about what he says is an orientation toward the future instead of sticking with the ways of the past. You can’t be a progressive on trade, he believes, unless you’re willing to talk about a new way to make trade actually work.

Well, there goes the GOP theory that the trade push is just some elaborate charade since someone as far left as Obama couldn’t possible want a free trade deal. This piece makes Obama out to be more technocratic, third-way guy than hard lefty ideologue. More Tony Blair than Ed Miliband, you might say. At least on this issue. And certainly not Bill de Blasio.