When I talked with Russ Feingold last week about what the Democratic candidates for president should do to win Tuesday's Wisconsin primary, he suggested that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton should go to the senator's hometown of Janesville and talk about trade.
Obama got the hint.
On Wednesday, the first full day of his Wisconsin primary campaign, the Illinois senator started in Janesville, where he delivered a rebuke to U.S. free trade policies that sounded a little like a speech Russ 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 Rock County 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 Wisconsin and Ohio. Many of those workers have been battered by trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the decision by the Clinton administration to extend permanent most-favored-nation training status to China.
In addition to echoing Clinton's "green jobs" rhetoric and 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," the candidate 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, Senator 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 timeout on trade. No one knows when this timeout 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 and senators such as Wisconsin's Feingold and Ohio's Sherrod Brown. And there will be appropriate skepticism about whether he will continue to err on the populist side after Wisconsin and Ohio have finished voting -- and after key players such as Feingold, Brown and former candidate John Edwards have endorsed.
Obama is not yet where Feingold is on trade and economic issues -- the two recently split on the Peru Free Trade Agreement, with Obama favoring it and Feingold opposing. But the presidential candidate is listening to the Wisconsin senator, and responding. Heck, Obama was even talking Wednesday about how jobs at the GM plant created the prosperity that caused "homes and businesses (to begin) to sprout up along Milwaukee and Main Streets" in Janesville -- avenues not far from where Feingold grew up.
And what of Hillary Clinton? She was in McAllen, Texas, Wednesday morning -- headed not for Janesville but for San Antonio.
John Nichols is associate editor of The Capital Times.Capitol Times
