DENVER, Colo. -- When times are bad, Democrats tend to sour on trade. So when Austan Goolsbee, an economic adviser to Barack Obama, reportedly told Canadian government officials that Obama wouldn’t really “redo” NAFTA (despite campaign claims), the campaign had to repudiate his comments. Obama also opposed the Colombian and South Korean free-trade deals. Yet while the American business establishment might see this as a red flag, Tom Donohue, the lead spokesman for American business, doesn’t take it too seriously. To him, Goolsbee’s comment was a “Kinsley gaffe”: when someone accidentally tells the truth.

Donohue told me he’d come to Denver to find common ground with Democrats (global warming, infrastructure investment) and remind them that, when they don’t see things his way, the Chamber—which represents three million companies—“can raise a lot of hell.” But he wasn’t lying awake at night imagining the death throes of free trade under President Obama. So Obama isn’t likely to “renegotiate” NAFTA? “When he started campaigning he might have been, but when he’s finished he won’t be,” Donohue says. “When he looks at NAFTA and sees that the largest sources of oil and gas are Canada and Mexico, he’ll forget all about a redo.”

In fact, the real bogeyman of business is “card check,” a proposed rule that would allow unions to organize more easily, partly by forgoing secret ballots. Unions, he says, will spend $500 million on this election, and he’s desperate to have enough business-friendly senators to keep a filibuster. “More Democrats than Republicans remind me of the importance of that, because they know if they’re owned by trial lawyers and the unions, they won’t be around long.”

Notably, there are no Obama advisers secretly telling businesspeople that Obama won’t really sign card-check legislation.