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The establishment is hyperventilating over the tough trade talk of
Clinton and Obama. The NY Times endorsed Hillary Clinton and John
McCain about one month ago. Now Hillary is deriding NAFTA and
saying we need a time out on trade agreements. Heresy!
Like
a child holding her ears and singing loudly to avoid hearing
uncomfortable truths, the NY Times editorial board repeats... and
repeats... and repeats its faulty world view over... and over... and
over. "It Must Be Ohio," is the Board's still-in-denial title of their editorial entry in today's Sunday Times.
The
faux-Economics-101 editorial rant denounces Clinton and Obama
statements in Ohio that NAFTA was a bad deal. Never mind the
evidence. Repeat world view here:
Trade opens foreign markets for American producers and gives
consumers more choices, while competition spurs productivity growth at
home.
They are so 1992.
Forget about correcting the trade
problems. Burial Insurance! We need more and better Burial
Insurance! Pay people who are crushed by trade.
The Democrats’ posturing on trade threatens to divert the nation’s
attention from what is really needed: a set of domestic policies to
help American workers cope with the dislocations wrought by
globalization and technological progress.
The editorial establishment still cannot believe that we have trade
deficits in virtually every category of goods. Low-tech,
high-tech, green-tech, whatever-tech. They never mention
it.
But the folks on the ground get it. This assessment
of why Obama's candidacy is roiling the Clinton campaign could have
easily been applied to the establishment-vs-the-citizenry dynamic
occurriing now on the trade issue.
In South Carolina, where last fall she was up 20 percentage points
in the polls, she relied on top-down endorsements and the patina of
inevitability, while the Obama campaign built a landslide-winning
organization from scratch at the grass roots.
The grass roots is rejecting the establishment on trade. The
establishment's impotent, noisy rage is increasingly comical.
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