So far so good, but he's got to bring home the bacon, and he's got a long way to go to do that.

Free trade is no panacea -- for Colombia to fully benefit from this deal it will need to accompany the agreement with sound economic policies that boost competitiveness.

In the eight months he's been in office, he certainly has done a tremendous amount of work. He has mastered a very complex brief in an extraordinarily short period of time.

It hasn't been handled very well. I would have thought the administration would have learned a lesson from the China National Offshore Oil Corp. of last year.

This record will likely remain unblemished in 2006.