Earvin “Magic” Johnson led many a fast break during his glory years with the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1990s, but even the gifted hoopster didn’t see the phenomenon of Barack Obama coming down full speed at his candidate, Hillary Clinton.

“None of us thought Obama would be able to do this much, this fast,” Johnson told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on one of the Sunday morning chat shows. “He has run an amazing campaign.”

Part of running a successful national campaign is bobbing and weaving down court,  just as Magic used to do when running the Lakers’ famed “Showtime” offense. Obama’s views on trade similarly go here-and-there, depending some on where he’s campaigning. In recent days, as Obama has barnstormed through the Rust Belt on his way to again laying a whopping on Hillary Clinton, Prince Barack has been the populist politican.

“One thing I do have to say about Sen. Clinton - she says speeches don’t put food on the table,” Obama said in Youngstown, Ohio this week, as cited in the New York Times. “Well, you know what? Nafta didn’t put food on the table either.”

That line wins wild applause in states like Ohio and Wisconsin, where economic anxieties run high and it’s easy to dump on trade with other countries as a chief culprit for the loss of manufacturing jobs. That view is so prevalent, in fact, that a recent Associated Press story cited a Wisconsin poll where 72 percent of respondents said trade takes more jobs than it creates.

No surprise then that both Obama and Clinton are channeling John Edwards this week in ripping trade and corporations for all that ails the economies of struggling Rust Belt states. The real reasons behind job losses, of course, run much deeper than dumping all of the blame on something like the North American Free Trade Agreement, but politicians can’t resist pandering to crowds for cheap applause lines.

Some of the Democratic Party’s chief constituencies, most notably labor unions, have always hated NAFTA and trade with other nations in general, preferring the U.S. impose protectionist policies and heavy government subsidies of struggling industries. According to this view, the U.S. should only trade with other countries if they enact the same sort of labor and wage rules and conditions that we have here. This would be quite a fantasy, obviously, if one expects the developing nations we do business with to immeadiately develop the same standard of living we enjoy in the U.S.

Trade in general, and NAFTA in particular, are easy whipping boys for TV and radio dopes like Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan, two aging white guys who are mad about many things, chief among them the changing demographics of America, which they lump with trade agreements as the ruin of the U.S. I’m a Wall Street Journal guy on this issue, believing as that newspaper advocates, “free markets and free people.”

It’s folly to think that goverment can protect the elimination of jobs in the private sector. The creation and elimination of jobs in various sectors of our economy is driven by ever changing market forces that are in turn influenced by improving technologies and the efficiencies they bring. There’s also the matter of changing lifestyles and the choices made by customers and how they combine to affect business, industries, and in turn, jobs.

Here’s an example.  I have a friend who moved to the Rio Grande Valley from Kentucky three years ago to help manage a small manufacuturing operation in Harlingen that supplies Matamoros maquilas with parts that are used in automobiles made by General Motors. Americans are buying fewer Chevrolets and Buicks and more Hondas and Toyotas, so demand for GM cars is down. Guess what? That small operation in Harlingen, with its parent company in Kentucky, has decided it can no longer justify its business enterprise here, so it’s closing down the local plant in a few months.

How would a President Obama or President Clinton stop that from happening? They couldn’t, of course, and the Democratic frontrunner has said as much when he’s speaking more honestly.

“Revolutions in communications and technology have made it easier for companies to send jobs wherever labor is cheapest, and that’s something that can’t be reversed,” Obama said this week in Ohio, in a moment of candor, as quoted in the NY Times. “So I’m not going to stand here and say that we can stop every job from going overseas. I don’t believe we can - or should - stop free trade.”

So, I’d say the candidate of hope shouldn’t give false hopes that, as president, he could substantially stem the forces of free markets and free people. He can’t and he ought to be honest about it and not allow himself to become a shill for the protectionists and demagogues of cable television.

- Joaquin Tijerina, Chisme Blogger

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.