The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [83]
I suggested that the folks in Galesburg might not find his answer reassuring.
“I said it’s possible, not probable,” he said. “I tend to be cautiously optimistic that if we get our fiscal house in order and improve our educational system, their children will do just fine. Anyway, there’s one thing that I would tell the people in Galesburg is certain. Any efforts at protectionism will be counterproductive—and it will make their children worse off in the bargain.”
I appreciated Rubin’s acknowledgment that American workers might have legitimate cause for concern when it came to globalization; in my experience, most labor leaders have thought deeply about the issue and can’t be dismissed as kneejerk protectionists.
Still, it was hard to deny Rubin’s basic insight: We can try to slow globalization, but we can’t stop it. The U.S. economy is now so integrated with the rest of the world, and digital commerce so widespread, that it’s hard to even imagine, much less enforce, an effective regime of protectionism. A tariff on imported steel may give temporary relief to U.S. steel producers, but it will make every U.S. manufacturer that uses steel in its products less competitive on the world market. It’s tough to “buy American” when a video game sold by a U.S. company has been developed by Japanese software engineers and packaged in Mexico. U.S. Border Patrol agents can’t interdict the services of a call center in India, or stop an electrical engineer in Prague from sending his work via email to a company in Dubuque. When it comes to trade, there are few borders left.
This doesn’t mean, however, that we should just throw up our hands and tell workers to fend for themselves. I would make this point to President Bush toward the end of the CAFTA debate, when I and a group of other senators were invited to the White House for discussions. I told the President that I believed in the benefits of trade, and that I had no doubt the White House could squeeze out the votes for this particular agreement. But I said that resistance to CAFTA had less to do with the specifics of the agreement and more to do with the growing insecurities of the American worker. Unless we found strategies to allay those fears, and sent a strong signal to American workers that the federal government was on their side, protectionist sentiment would only grow.
The President listened politely and said that he’d be interested in hearing my ideas. In the meantime, he said, he hoped he could count on my vote.
He couldn’t. I ended up voting against CAFTA, which passed the Senate by a vote of 55 to 45. My vote gave me no satisfaction, but I felt it was the only way to register a protest against what I considered to be the White House’s inattention to the losers from free trade. Like Bob Rubin, I am optimistic about the long-term prospects for the U.S. economy and the ability of U.S. workers to compete in a free trade environment—but only if we distribute the costs and benefits of globalization more fairly across the population.
THE LAST TIME we faced an economic transformation as disruptive as the one we face today, FDR led the nation to a new social compact—a bargain between government, business, and workers that resulted in widespread prosperity and economic security for more than fifty years. For the average American worker, that security rested on three pillars: the ability to find a job that paid enough to support a family and save for emergencies; a package of health and retirement benefits from his employer; and a government safety net—Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, unemployment insurance, and to a lesser extent federal bankruptcy and pension protections—that could cushion the fall of those who suffered setbacks in their lives.
Certainly the impulse behind this New Deal compact involved a sense of social solidarity: the idea that employers should do right by their workers, and that if fate or miscalculation caused any one of us to stumble, the larger American community would be there to lift us up.
But this compact