Lest the reader think I’ve gotten too starry-eyed over the speakers at the DNC so far, let me say that I agree wholeheartedly with William Saletan’s gripes about Obama’s speech:
Two things about the speech trouble me….One is the Democratic Party’s exploitation of hostility to free trade. Obama, like other speakers at this convention, complains about “companies shipping jobs overseas” and workers “losing their union jobs at the Maytag plant that’s moving to Mexico.” At the same time, Obama holds himself out as a symbol of a diverse, welcoming America. How can Democrats be the party of diversity at home but xenophobia abroad, the party that loves Mexican-Americans but hates Maytag plants in Mexico, the party that thinks Obama’s mom deserves a job more than Obama’s dad does? I understand the politics of it. But what about the morals?
The other thing that bothers me is the Democrats’ hypocrisy about division. They never cease accusing Republicans of dividing the country. It’s like the old joke that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t. Except that in this version of the joke, the comic goes on to claim that he’s one of the people who don’t.
I’m a little more inclined to indulge fault number two - after all the Republicans are the ones trying to pass a constitutional amendment pointed at denying me rights - I just wonder how effectively the hat trick can be performed, especially in less able hands than Obama’s.
The first point - the left xenophobia (and Daschle’s foreign policy xenophobia when he complains of building schools in Iraq) - is more serious. It’s hard to convince progressives that free trade actually helps the third world, but it should be hard to see how casting Mexico or India as the economic scapegoat squares with a putative desire to help the third world. Brad DeLong has more on this today:
Well, dealing with outsourcing for one thing. It’s coming–it’s coming over the next generation. And the Democratic Party will have a very hard time figuring out how to deal with it constructively. It’s likely to begin thinking that people in India who want jobs processing document-images for U.S. companies are our *enemies*. We can’t afford to do that–a world in which Indians and Chinese in fifty years are taught that the U.S. tried to keep them poor will be a very unsafe world. A world in which we try to block expanded world trade will be a world in which we will be much poorer than we need to be.
His entire post is an excellent retort to the facile policy of the speeches, in fact, and worth a full read.
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