Untitled Document
JANESVILLE, Wis. — When I talked with U.S. Sen.
Russ Feingold about what the Democratic candidates for president needed to
do to win the Wisconsin primary, he suggested that both Barack Obama and
Hillary Clinton go to the senator’s hometown of Janesville and talk
about trade. Obama got the hint. On the first full day of his Wisconsin primary
campaign, the Illinois senator started in Janesville, where he delivered a
rebuke to the free-trade policies of the Bill Clinton and George Bush eras
that sounded a little like a speech Feingold might have delivered. “We are not standing on the brink of recession
due to forces beyond our control. The fallout from the housing crisis
that’s cost jobs and wiped out savings was not an inevitable part of
the business cycle. It was a failure of leadership and imagination in
Washington — the culmination of decades of decisions that were made
or put off without regard to the realities of a global economy and the
growing inequality it’s produced,” Obama told workers at the
General Motors assembly plant in the southern-Wisconsin city. “It’s a Washington where decades of trade
deals like NAFTA and China have been signed with plenty of protections for
corporations and their profits but none for our environment or our workers
who’ve seen factories shut their doors and millions of jobs
disappear, workers whose right to organize and unionize has been under
assault for the last eight years,” continued the senator, who is
suddenly very conscious of the need to appeal to working-class voters. In addition to proposing new infrastructure spending
designed to “generate nearly 2 million new jobs — many of them
in the construction industry that’s been hard hit by this housing
crisis,” Obama sought to distinguish himself from Clinton on trade. “It’s also time to look to the future and
figure out how to make trade work for American workers. I won’t stand
here and tell you that we can — or should — stop free trade. We
can’t stop every job from going overseas. But I also won’t
stand here and accept an America where we do nothing to help American
workers who have lost jobs and opportunities because of these trade
agreements — and that’s a position of mine that doesn’t
change based on who I’m talking to or the election I’m running
in,” Obama said, taking a swipe at Clinton. “You know, in the
years after her husband signed NAFTA Sen. Clinton would go around talking
about how great it was and how many benefits it would bring. Now that
she’s running for president, she says we need a time-out on trade. No
one knows when this time-out will end. Maybe after the election.”
Then Obama declared: “[When] I am president, I
will not sign another trade agreement unless it has protections for our
environment and protections for American workers. And I’ll pass the
Patriot Employer Act that I’ve been fighting for ever since I ran for
the Senate — we will end the tax breaks for companies who ship our
jobs overseas, and we will give those breaks to companies who create good
jobs with decent wages right here in America.”
This speech represents progress for Obama, who has
not up to now been a particularly strong advocate for the fair-trade
policies favored by labor and environmental groups. The cautious contender is still a long way from
embracing the full agenda of the steel and auto workers’ union
leaders and industrial-state senators and congressmen he has been talking
with at some length in recent days. But Obama’s message at the GM plant was a good
one — for the workers of Janesville and the other factory towns
who’ll be voting this year.
John Nichols is
Washington correspondent for
The Nation magazine.
This article appears in Feb 14-20, 2008.
