Investor's Business Daily
Original Publish Date: July 2, 2008
Election: Unlike his rival, John McCain has shown plain commitment to mutual prosperity with our neighbors. He's urging free trade and flying to Colombia. By contrast, what has Barack Obama done?
It's an impressive and unconventional campaign stop for McCain, 1,600 miles off Florida on Colombia's Spanish Main coast in Cartagena.
The media are baffled by it, wondering where the electoral votes are. The Wall Street Journal even said that McCain somehow needed to "to pad his foreign policy credentials."
But McCain's top Latin America adviser, Otto Reich, a former top diplomat under President Reagan and both Bush I and Bush II, told IBD they're only flummoxed because it's more about principles than politics: That is, McCain's commitment to the region and free trade.
"In supporting our allies in Colombia and Mexico, he is carrying forward the enterprise for the Americas initiative first envisioned by Ronald Reagan in 1979, the one that changed everything," Reich said.
Reagan's vision of a free trade zone from Barrow, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, Chile was what led to the free-trade deals now passed with Mexico, Central America, Dominican Republic, Peru and Chile, according to Reich. Those pacts have strengthened those democracies and kept populist predators at bay, as Reagan wanted.
But Colombia (and Panama) are still left out. In fact, Colombia has been hideously mistreated by the Democratic establishment in Congress, which broke its own 2007 promise to pass a free-trade deal.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insulted Colombia's democratically elected president last year, and then went one worse by shutting out all 44 million Colombians from a free-trade pact they'd spent years earning. She did so using a legislative technicality, not a clean vote.
McCain stressed in a recent ad that the U.S. "can't go back on its word" to allies like Colombia. That's why he's making a show there.
Failing to pass a trade deal is a classic case of cutting off our nose to spite our face. The big effect of passing the Colombia pact would be to drop one-way tariffs on American goods, enabling U.S. companies to sell more in new markets. McCain stressed that if we don't get these pacts passed, we shut off a vital avenue to growth.
"We must encourage more free-trade agreements to create more jobs on both sides of the border," McCain emphasized in his ad.
Not that any of this has been a problem for Democrats like Obama, who say they love Latin America but still oppose the free-trade pacts, following polls. In fact, a poll-driven Obama first denounced the free-trade agreements in place in Mexico and Canada, and then shifted his position. As for Colombia free trade, he's against it.
McCain "deserves credit for persistently making the case to the American people that free trade is vital to our economic growth even when the issue is less than popular," said Club for Growth President Pat Toomey.
By contrast, Obama has talked a good game about free trade and Latin America, saying he was all for the prosperity of our neighbors and free trade. "I intend to visit the countries of Latin America," Obama said last Feb. 10. "I intend to put together an alliance for progress in the 21st century. We are going to strengthen trade ties."
He also told a Cuban-American audience he wasn't like other candidates who came down to Miami during election time and were never heard from since.
But thus far, that's exactly the kind of candidate he is. Despite his rhetoric, Obama remains dead set against every free-trade accord we have with our neighbors. And he's yet to set foot there —though he's now embarking on a grand tour of Europe. The word is, he won't go to Latin America at all.
McCain, by contrast, thinks Latin America's a vital part of America's future, and has baffled the media by visiting there instead of the well worn tourist traps of the diplomatic set. He is making a serious stand for free trade with our allies who are threatened by petrotyrants and populists.
Colombia is a country that only won its independence from Venezuela in 1819 because it could economically sustain itself through free trade with U.S. ports.
McCain's visit is a reinforcement of that long-time support because, the fact is, Colombia is fighting the same battle now.
John McCain's trade policies with Colombia are already working - as he noted in television interviews this morning, the price of Colombian cocaine is up, a sure sign of a strengthening trade-based economic relationship with this important swing state. Go McCain!
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