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INDIANA LOOMING: Obama’s Fair Trade Challenge

With the Indiana and North Carolina primaries looming, there is no spinning Barack Obama’s loss in Pennsylvania. It was decisive. It went beyond the Obama playbook.

Before Pennsylvania, the case could be made that Obama was a closer. Before Pennsylvania, the longer Obama had to campaign, the more he would close the margin. The feeling was: If he had enough time, he would win on any playing field.

Something has changed.

Contrary to pundit analyses, it is not the ghost of Reverend Wright or the remarks in San Francisco or the fighting spirit of the unsinkable Hillary Clinton. What has changed, palpably and painfully, is the bite of a stumbling economy. The price of gas, the cost of food, the home foreclosures, the declining dollar and the burgeoning debt combined with faltering job security and falling wages have recast the political landscape in purely economic terms.

The fantasy that it is only a temporary decline is giving way to pervasive gloom. We as a people are in deep trouble and we have only begun to recognize the reality of our circumstance.

Why has this new reality impacted Obama disproportionately? Because the people irrationally believe that Hillary can somehow return us to the days of her husband’s administration when the economy was thriving. Because the people do not understand that the seeds of the crisis we are now confronting were sown in the Clinton White House – and Obama has pointedly not made the case.

If the economy is the question, what is the answer? Regulation, stimulation, relief, education and training? These are the old school answers. Hillary can play that game as well as anyone: A five-point plan for every problem and a commission to contemplate.

Hillary can even offer a renegotiation of NAFTA with the obligatory wink and a nod.

Contrary to popular opinion, the people are a little smarter than that. NAFTA may be an answer to the immigration conundrum but it does not go to the core of our staggering economy.

When we pick up the phone to call for assistance on anything from computer software to billing problems, the voice on the other end of the line is almost invariable Indian. When we use our dwindling dollars to purchase products at Wal-Mart, we find it is almost invariably made in China.

We know where the jobs went. We know why our wages are in decline. We know why all our manufacturing plants closed.

They went to China and India and Indonesia and Malaysia and Latin American nations where labor is non-existent and workers are paid slave wages and receive no health or retirement benefits.

Hillary Clinton is an old school politician whose credentials on fair trade are as transparent and duplicitous as her policies on the Iraq War.

When Hillary’s chief strategist was caught in a secret meeting promoting a free trade deal with Columbia, he was released not because of the policy but because he was caught.

Hillary is Hillary. We expect her to play both sides of every issue. She will not hesitate to talk the talk though she has no intention of walking the walk. But Obama is supposed to be different. He is the agent of change. We demand more of him, as well we should.

Fair trade that requires our trading partners to honor the rights of labor and to pay workers living wages is the common sense answer to our current economic crisis. It is an answer that goes to the heart of the problem and promises fair remedy.

American workers can compete on an equal playing field but we cannot compete against slave labor.

That Obama has not made the case for fair trade, that he so rarely in fact addresses trade policy beyond the limited sound bite on NAFTA, tells me that we may have reached the limit of the Obama vision.

What bothered me about Obama’s San Francisco statement was not elitism (there was nothing elitist about it); it was his inclusion of trade as one the crutches that an embittered electorate clings to; it was the suggestion that trade is a wedge issue.

That inclusion suggests that either Obama does not get it on trade or he is committed to maintain the free trade policies of the last two administrations.

If that is the case, then we have all been duped. He cannot deliver the change he has promised. If that is the case, then trade is the critical flaw that will continue to haunt him in Indiana and further down the line.

Make no mistake: Hillary Clinton is not the answer and John McCain looms as a living nightmare but if Barack Obama does not find his voice on this issue – the most prominent issue on the minds of voters and one of the three or four most critical issues of our time – then the brilliant light of promise he held forth for so many Americans will simply fade to black.

Jazz.

JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE BEEN POSTED ON NUMEROUS CITES OF THE WORLDWIDE WEB, INCLUDING THE ALBION MONITOR, BELLACIAO, BUZZLE, COUNTERPUNCH, DISSIDENT VOICE, THE DAILY SCARE, THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS AND PACIFIC FREE PRESS. SEE WWW.JAZZMANCHRONICLES.BLOGSPOT.COM.

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