Obama’s Trade Backfire :He Turns his Politics of Contempt on Democrats, who Abandon Him.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/obamas-trade-backfire-1431472593
The trade bill failed a major procedural vote on Tuesday, with every Senate Democrat save one blocking debate on what President Obama continues to call an economic priority. The 52-45 liberal blockade doesn’t mean trade-promotion authority is dead. But preventing a setback from becoming a rout will require a Republican salvage operation to rescue Mr. Obama from the consequences of his governing methods.
The politics of trade require Presidents to cultivate coalitions from the center out, building a majority between statist progressives and the protectionist right. But that is not Mr. Obama’s thing. His instincts are to govern from the left, treat Members of Congress as peasants who must bow before his superior wisdom, and then assail the motives and character of his opponents.
Mr. Obama’s attack-and-polarize approach worked while he had overwhelming liberal majorities, despite private unrest among Democrats about the White House’s ex-cathedra habits. They didn’t mind when he attacked Republicans as moral cretins and dissemblers. The difference is that on trade Mr. Obama has turned his contempt on Democrats.
At the Nike campus in Oregon over the weekend, Mr. Obama berated “my fellow-travellers on minimum wage and on job training and on clean energy. . . . And then on this one, they’re like whooping on me.” He added that these critics are “just wrong” and “they’re making this stuff up.”
In a post-speech interview with Yahoo news, Mr. Obama was asked about Senator Elizabeth Warren’s contention that the trade deal could undermine financial regulation. Mr. Obama called her “absolutely wrong,” and then talked of himself: “I passed it. Think about the logic of that, right? The notion that I had a massive fight with Wall Street . . . and then I sign a provision that would unravel it? I’d have to be pretty stupid.”
Mr. Obama added with his special condescension that “the truth of the matter is that Elizabeth is, you know, a politician like everybody else. And you know, she’s got a voice that she wants to get out there. I understand that.” We agree with Mr. Obama on the merits, but the point is that Presidents are supposed to work toward consensus through argument and persuasion, not ad hominem insults toward lesser political species. No wonder his nominal allies defied his trade instructions on Tuesday.
Senate Democrats with the principled exception of Tom Carper of Delaware claim they merely want to consider a customs bill as well as trade-promotion authority. But this is an 11th-hour double-cross. Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch and ranking Democrat Ron Wyden explicitly agreed in April to consider the customs bill separately.
The original Hatch-Wyden deal was clean trade promotion—plus trade-adjustment subsidies as the price free traders could accept at the liberal tollbooth. For this Republicans have been criticized on the right. The new liberal demand for the customs measure introduces currency manipulation, steel tariffs and other destructive provisions as part of the base bill, and it speaks volumes that Democrats reneged over the protests of a Democratic President.
Then again, maybe liberals got greedy as a result of Mr. Obama’s own economics of resentment. He has spent six years demeaning the benefits of free markets—on taxes, entitlements, labor markets and much else—only to do a 180-reversal on trade. His liberal fellow-travellers have a point when they ask if this is the same Obama who denigrated free trade in 2008.
The problem now is that failing to pass trade-promotion authority would be far more than a defeat for Mr. Obama. It would do great harm to U.S. national interests and the world economy. The Pacific deal is the best opportunity in decades to liberalize trade. A country that cannot overcome narrow geographic or business or labor interests, and that shrinks from global competition, is choosing national decline.
The larger lesson is that polarization and division are never appealing qualities in a President, and eventually the ill-will and mistrust these tactics foment backfire on a leader. Perhaps the trade bill can be salvaged if Mr. Obama recommits to his original theme of “hope and change”—and if this time he means it.
Comments are closed.
