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| Home Front: Politix |
| Do Protectionists Drink Coronas? or Molson's? |
| 2008-03-04 |
| Jim Geraghty, National Review At the heart of the "NAFTA-quiddick" brouhaha is the divide between the Democratic party's base and its elites; it's a divide that's probably impossible to bridge, but the two contenders have to try anyway. The party's elites believe that you cannot build prosperity with a policy that ensures that foreign products don't get onto your shelves and that you don't export anything to the rest of the world's consumers. They believe that trade with other countries is good, that technological innovation has cost more manufacturing jobs than any cheap foreign labor, and that if trade barriers could ensure prosperity, North Korea would be one of the world's richest nations. The party's base believes that happy days would be here again if we would just get rid of the trade agreements with acronyms; that Americans would be better off if they would go back to driving the Dodge Dart and the Studebaker and stop buying products made in other countries. When Obama says, "I've talked to workers who have seen their plants shipped overseas as a consequence of bad trade deals like NAFTA, literally seeing equipment unbolted from the floors of factories and shipped to China," none of these voters question why a trade agreement with Mexico and Canada would result in equipment being shipped to China. The base gets its views on trade from their guts and from anecdotes; they don't see drinking a six-pack of Corona as taking away jobs from American breweries. The elites get their views from statistics and reports; they can point to numbers that indicate how many jobs are created from exports, and how many consumers enjoy products from all around the world, but their arguments rarely stir the blood. I also saw something in the WSJ either yesterday or over the weekend, to the effect that Ohio's largest export customers (in terms of sales $$) are Canada and Mexico. You think Ohio's manufacturing economy is bad now, just think of the fun if they abrogate NAFTA. The base doesn't want to hear the counterargument; the elites are afraid to articulate their views too loudly, lest they be accused of insensitivity to the plight of the working man. But they don't want a dramatic backtracking on trade, like repealing NAFTA. In a battle between the gut and the brain in the Democratic electorate, I wouldn't bet heavily on the synapses to win out. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #1 The same base shops at Walmart and the Dollar Store, full of cheap imports and excited to get a bargain. They also ususally have working class jobs connected to loading, unloading, hauling, or selling these same cheap goods across the country. They just don't want Mexican or Canadian trucks to do it! |
| Posted by: Danielle 2008-03-04 17:18 |