Bobo says the U.S. still has much more to gain than to lose from openness, trade and globalization. Mr. Herbert says the electorate is upset, anxious and hungry for change. But “weak tea” is as good a term as any to describe what the Democrats are offering. Here’s Bobo:
Lou Dobbs is winning. He’s not winning personally. He’s not going to start winning presidential awards or elite respect. But his message is winning. Month by month the ideas that once prevailed on the angry fringe enter the mainstream and turn into conventional wisdom.
Once there was a majority in favor of liberal immigration policies, but apparently that’s not true anymore, at least if you judge by campaign rhetoric. Once there was a bipartisan consensus behind free trade, but that’s not true anymore, either. Even Republicans, by a two-to-one majority, believe free trade is bad for America, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll.
Once upon a time, the fact that hundreds of millions of people around the world are rising out of poverty would have been a source of pride and optimism. But if you listen to the presidential candidates, improvements in the developing world are menacing. Their speeches constitute a symphony of woe about lead-painted toys, manipulated currencies and stolen jobs.
And if Dobbsianism is winning when times are good, you can imagine how attractive it’s going to seem if we enter the serious recession that Larry Summers convincingly and terrifyingly forecasts in yesterday’s Financial Times. If the economy dips as seriously as that, the political climate could shift in ugly ways.
So it’s worth pointing out now more than ever that Dobbsianism is fundamentally wrong. It plays on legitimate anxieties, but it rests at heart on a more existential fear — the fear that America is under assault and is fundamentally fragile. It rests on fears that the America we once knew is bleeding away.
And that’s just not true. In the first place, despite the ups and downs of the business cycle, the United States still possesses the most potent economy on earth. Recently the World Economic Forum and the International Institute for Management Development produced global competitiveness indexes, and once again they both ranked the United States first in the world.
In the World Economic Forum survey, the U.S. comes in just ahead of Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden and Germany (China is 34th). The U.S. gets poor marks for macroeconomic stability (the long-term federal debt), for its tax structure and for the low savings rate. But it leads the world in a range of categories: higher education and training, labor market flexibility, the ability to attract global talent, the availability of venture capital, the quality of corporate management and the capacity to innovate.
William W. Lewis of McKinsey surveyed global competitive in dozens of business sectors a few years ago, and concluded, “The United States is the productivity leader in virtually every industry.”
Second, America’s fundamental economic strength is rooted in the most stable of assets — its values. The U.S. is still an astonishing assimilation machine. It has successfully absorbed more than 20 million legal immigrants over the past quarter-century, an extraordinary influx of human capital. Americans are remarkably fertile. Birthrates are relatively high, meaning that in 2050, the average American will be under 40, while the average European, Chinese and Japanese will be more than a decade older.
The American economy benefits from low levels of corruption. American culture still transmits some ineffable spirit of adventure. American students can’t compete with, say, Singaporean students on standardized tests, but they are innovative and creative throughout their lives. The U.S. standard of living first surpassed the rest of the world’s in about 1740, and despite dozens of cycles of declinist foreboding, the country has resolutely refused to decay.
Third, not every economic dislocation has been caused by trade and the Chinese. Between 1991 and 2007, the U.S. trade deficit exploded to $818 billion from $31 billion. Yet as Robert Samuelson has pointed out, during that time the U.S. created 28 million jobs and the unemployment rate dipped to 4.6 percent from 6.8 percent.
That’s because, as Robert Lawrence of Harvard and Martin Baily of McKinsey have calculated, 90 percent of manufacturing job losses are due to domestic forces. As companies become more technologically advanced, they shed workers (the Chinese shed 25 million manufacturing jobs between 1994 and 2004).
Meanwhile, the number of jobs actually lost to outsourcing is small, and recent reports suggest the outsourcing trend is slowing down. They are swamped by the general churn of creative destruction. Every quarter the U.S. loses somewhere around seven million jobs, and creates a bit more than seven million more. That double-edged process is the essence of a dynamic economy.
I’m writing this column from Beijing. I can look out the window and see the explosive growth. But as the Chinese will be the first to tell you, their dazzling prosperity is built on fragile foundations. In the United States, the situation is the reverse. We have obvious problems. But the foundations of American prosperity are strong. The U.S. still has much more to gain than to lose from openness, trade and globalization.
I just can’t wait to see if Paul Krugman has any sort of response to this. Here’s Mr. Herbert:
A friend of mine, talking about the Democratic presidential candidates, tossed out a wonderful mixed metaphor: “This is awfully weak tea to have to hang your hat on.”
The notion that Bush & Co. had fouled things up so badly for Republicans that just about any Democrat could romp to victory in 2008 was never realistic. What’s interesting now, with the first contests just weeks away, is the extent to which Democratic voters are worried about the possibility that none of their candidates have the stuff to take the White House.
This election, the most important in decades, cries out for strong leadership. The electorate is upset, anxious and hungry for change. But “weak tea” is as good a term as any to describe what the Democrats are offering.
Hillary Clinton is the cautious, rigidly programmed candidate who, in the view of most voters, will say whatever the moment demands. Spontaneous she ain’t. You can just picture her cross-examining advisers and prowling through polling data to determine whether she’s for or against driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants.
Barack Obama has the incandescent smile, and the personality to go with it. Oprah loves him, and a lot of campuses are wild for him. But you still wonder if there’s any there there.
His is the make-nice candidacy, no sharp edges. But it’s one thing to offer yourself as the agent of change, and quite another to answer the obvious question, “Change to what?”
John Edwards has been the most forceful of the so-called top-tier candidates. But his plan from the beginning was to move to the left of Senator Clinton, never expecting to find Senator Obama happily patrolling that progressive, antiwar region.
Mr. Obama had barely stenciled his name on his Senate office door before grabbing his hat and announcing he was running for president. That was faster than even Mr. Edwards’s first, lightning-quick decision to seek the highest office in the land.
The problem for voters is that very little leadership has emerged from the many months of frenetic Democratic fund-raising and politicking.
For all the noise and incessant posturing, we still don’t have a clear sense of where Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or any of the others would take the country.
Bush-bashing is not enough. Unless one of the Democratic candidates finds the courage to step up and offer a vision of an American future so compelling that voters head to the polls with a sense of excitement and great expectation, the Republican Party could once again capture the White House (despite its awful performance over the past eight years) with its patented mixture of snake oil and demagoguery.
The G.O.P. game plan is already being pieced together. The White House hopes to inoculate Republican candidates on the Iraq war issue by bringing home a significant number of combat troops in the middle of the general election. And the demagogic issue of choice for 2008 is immigration.
The Willie Horton ugliness of 1988 will be like nothing compared with the concerted attack to be unleashed by the G.O.P. on illegal immigrants next year.
The Democrats will have to figure out a way to counter that with an appeal to the better angels of our nature, and that will require courage.
The need to offer an honest vision that is almost electric in its intensity is especially important for Senators Clinton and Obama. Both have to rally enough voters to overcome deep wells of prejudice in this society. That can’t be done by referencing a résumé, or in a nine-second response to a question from Wolf Blitzer.
The American public, tired of war and economically insecure, longs for a leader who will tell the truth and offer a way out of the current morass.
A Democrat can win with a realistic plan for exiting Iraq and, more important, a full-blown economic strategy that addresses the growing anxiety over the fading American dream.
This debilitating anxiety is fed by an uncertain job market; by the housing crisis and the humongous debt that is smothering the middle class; by the long-term erosion of health and pension benefits; by the increasing cost of higher education; and so forth.
It is this spreading anxiety that makes it so easy for the demagogues to gin up the rage against foreigners.
A Democrat who makes a believable case that these problems can be dealt with effectively — and who asks the public to roll up its sleeves and join in such an effort — can win.
But that’s not what we’re getting. Not so far. And maybe it’s not necessary. Maybe the economy will be so bad next year that a Democrat will win in any event. But that’s not the kind of tea you want to hang your hat on.
