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The growing skepticism on trade coming from Democratic candidates as well as the Bush administration has bred nostalgia among free traders for President Bill Clinton's willingness to take political heat to push for open markets.

Yet rather than long for the past, those of us who want to continue open-market policies that reduce global poverty, spark innovation, generate higher-paying jobs and keep prices low for our most hard-pressed working families need to recognize that the road forward lies in finding what Clinton called globalization with a human face. In short, we need a new progressive consensus that both embraces the power of open markets and addresses the legitimate anxiety of our workers and communities.

The "outsourcing" debate has helped demonstrate how unresponsive the old debate between protectionism and "hands off" free trade is to our current economic challenges. On one hand, repealing NAFTA, pulling out of the World Trade Organization or even efforts to mandate an international minimum wage have virtually nothing to do with whether Dell puts more call centers in India. We have no choice but to embrace the dynamism of the global economy and stop pretending we can shut it off or slow it down.

On the other hand, we will never find common ground if those who espouse free trade from comfortable chairs in comfortable offices fail to recognize that we have a cost-sharing crisis when our policies allow a portion of our workers and their communities to pay dearly for the open-market and technology-driven benefits we all enjoy.

Here are five steps toward a new consensus:

• Take job creation seriously. The historic job loss we have recently experienced makes clear how vital it is to focus on jump-starting jobs in a weak labor market. The Bush administration erred seriously by using a weak economy only as a pretext for low-bang-for-the-buck supply-side tax cuts, instead of calling for new jobs tax credits, temporary tax cuts for families who would spend the money, and state assistance that would reduce education cuts, tax increases and tuition hikes that only fuel downturns. And while some outsourcing is inevitable, we should address the degree that tax policy as well as high health and energy costs make job creation less attractive here.

  Furthermore, we need to invest in a modern infrastructure in remote and poor areas. While lower wages in India and China may be a fact of life, why should we ever be outpaced because there is better broadband in Bangalore than Buffalo?

• A "preemption strategy." When communities and workers are spiraling down due to global competition, their only option is to fight for protectionism or accept devastation. We need a preemptive strategy that gives workers options. While the practice of government picking winners through industrial policy has been rightly discredited, we often can predict when an industry or set of workers is threatened by global competition. Why not employ "reverse industrial policy" ideas such as creating "globalization adjustment zones" and investment incentives for communities and retraining options for workers before, not after, jobs are lost? We could even consider buy-out strategies for small-business owners, workers and small farmers in select cases where a few stakeholders block clear and broad-based interests of the U.S. economy or global poverty reduction.

• Real dislocation insurance, not token retraining. Adjustment policies are the prenuptial agreements of public policy. While no one wants to hear about what happens when everything goes wrong, we need a system that allows someone to pick up a phone, call a single number and get clear instructions on all the available dislocation and reemployment services. We should go even further in merging our unemployment insurance and our retraining and reemployment services into a seamless system available at a single location where we also provide temporary health care, mortgage assistance and wage insurance for older workers willing to work but unable to find jobs at comparable wages. Access should be universal, not dependent on whether a job was lost to trade, technological changes or a weak economy.

• Education -- really. For less than the cost of the recent tax cuts for only the top 1 percent of earners, our nation could have afforded a universal preschool and after-school initiative and a dramatic effort to encourage more young, disadvantaged Americans to seek and afford a college degree. We could have done all that and still reduced the deficit. Perhaps the specter of outsourcing will finally wake our leaders to the fact that a major push on education is more compelling for our economic future than the next round of supply-side tax cuts.

• Break the deadlock on trade and global poverty reduction. We need to get beyond the impoverished debate that open markets are either the principal cause of sweatshops or that they automatically reduce poverty. While we must support strong labor and environmental standards, we should not allow disagreement over enforcement to prevent us from seeking a broader and more creative globalization agenda that supports universal basic education, fights abusive child labor and sweatshops, strengthens civil society watchdogs and independent monitors, and funds transition assistance to workers and small farmers hurt by market opening, while insisting on codes of corporate conduct that support core labor rights.

The writer was national economic adviser to President Bill Clinton and is now director of economic programs at the Center for American Progress.