February 13, 2004
The Washington Post, Page A27
By E. J. Dionne Jr.Sen. John Edwards, who has had perfect rhetorical pitch in this year's presidential campaign, altered the opening of his stump speech this week. The change is a warning to free-traders: Guys, you'd better wake up! There's rebellion in the country, a justified revolt by workers, who cannot understand, why the economic recovery has produced so few new jobs.
Edwards told the tale of a father coming home from his factory job to put his daughter to bed. "He knows his night is over, when he gives her a hug," Edwards said, speaking in Milwaukee Tuesday. "But tonight... he'll be coming home to tell her that his factory is closing, that he's about to lose his job."
It's worth hearing Edwards to understand the power of this issue. He's not telling an economic story. He's offering a morality tale about a decent American hammered by the system. "It's not because he's done anything wrong," Edwards said. "He's done what he's supposed to do, he's been responsible, he's worked hard, he's raised his family."
Nor is the factory closing, because the company decided to stop making its product. "The problem is they're going to make it somewhere else," Edwards says. "They're going to make it somewhere outside of his community, outside of his country."
Why? "They only care about profits, they have lobbyists everywhere and they own this White House." The people in charge, he says, "don't hear the other America. They don't see the face of this father, who had to come home and tell his little girl that he no longer had a job."
Now, contrast Edwards's evocative language with the cold words of the new Economic Report of the President and you'll understand, why even Republicans, such as House Speaker Dennis Hastert, are furious at President Bush's economists.
"One facet of increased services trade is the increased use of offshore outsourcing, in which a company relocates labor-intensive service industry functions to another country," the report says dryly, italicizing the key phrase. But not to worry. "When a good or service is produced more cheaply abroad," the president's report lectures, "it makes more sense to import it, than to make or provide it domestically." Makes sense to whom? On Tuesday a group of 19 Democratic senators, led by New York's Charles E. Schumer and including Edwards, called on Bush to repudiate the report.
I can already hear free-traders sigh. In the long run, they will say, free trade benefits everyone. But in the long run, as John Maynard Keynes once said, we are all dead. In the short run, the growing prosperity gap between investors and employees is altering the American landscape on trade questions. Democratic front-runner John Kerry knows this as well as Edwards does, which is why Kerry keeps attacking "Benedict Arnold" companies that move jobs overseas.
The outsourcing of service and white-collar jobs, says Robert Borosage, co-director of the pro-labor Campaign for America's Future, "has outraged not only the well-educated middle class, but also working-class parents. They were sending their kids to college, so they could get good jobs that are now being shipped abroad."
Consider the exit polls in Tuesday's primaries! In Tennessee 71 percent of the voters said that "U.S. trade with other countries" took more jobs from the state; only 12 percent said trade created more jobs. In Virginia the comparable figures were 55 percent and 19 percent.
Part of the problem is with the contradictions free-traders refuse to confront. Why, for example, should there be free trade in jobs and manufacturing, but an absolute ban on importing prescription drugs from Canada or Australia? But at least some free-traders acknowledge the larger problem: that displaced workers need more, than "palliatives", as Bruce Reed, president of the strongly free-trade Democratic Leadership Council, put it. "We need to offer an expansive enough opportunity agenda to make the trade bargain worthwhile," he said. "Workers, who fear for their current jobs, want to hear, where they can find their next one."
Indeed. But for the moment they are hearing only bromides. The community of dads Edwards invokes deserves better answers - from both parties. They have a right to be angry.