International Herald Tribune
By Indira A.R. Lakshmanan
Original Publish Date: July 22, 2008
Evendale, Ohio - At General Electric's sprawling jet-engine plant outside Cincinnati, 80 percent of orders come from overseas, up from just over half in 2003, and employment has risen for five consecutive years. It's the kind of trade success John McCain loves to talk about.
Off the busy factory floor, Gary Jordan, machinist, is not as enthusiastic. Ask him what trade policy the next U.S. president should pursue, and he blames foreign competition for inflicting pain on other workers in Ohio, the Rust Belt battleground state that decided the election in 2004.
"When you see everyone losing their jobs around you, I have to question how much exports are helping this country," says Jordan, 51, president of the United Auto Workers GE local in Evendale. Jordan is backing Barack Obama, who has criticized some trade deals for not doing enough to protect workers and the environment.
Stumping through Ohio, Michigan and other industrial swing states, Senator McCain, 71, Republican of Arizona, and Senator Obama, Democrat of Illinois, 46, are struggling to balance economic and political realities: to project confidence about America's future in a global economy while conveying concern for people whose jobs have disappeared.
The most effective campaign pitch must exude "both optimism and empathy," says Ed Gresser, a former trade official under President Bill Clinton and author of a history of U.S. trade policy.
Exports have been one of the few bright spots driving U.S. economic growth in the past year. They are projected to double to $1.95 trillion in 2008 from $1 trillion in 2003, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Still, 42 percent of Americans think trade is bad for the United States, a level of suspicion much higher than in Europe or Asia, according to a 2007 survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
Ohio is the only state where exports have increased every year in the past decade. Today, half a million workers, including one in four at factories, depend on foreign markets or employers, says Lieutenant Governor Lee Fisher.
At the same time, the state has lost a quarter-million manufacturing jobs since 2000, making Ohio ground zero for the trade debate in the 2004 election and again in this year's presidential primaries. According to a National Public Radio poll released July 17, 77 percent of Ohioans feel employment is "difficult to find," and 52 percent say "jobs moving overseas" is a "big problem" in their communities.
While that makes Ohio "a tough place to talk about trade," McCain is not backing off on the topic, says an adviser, Rob Portman. The senator's tough-love message has startled - and sometimes silenced - audiences in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
"I'll look you in the eye again and tell you that there are some jobs that won't come back," McCain told voters July 10 in the Detroit suburb of Belleville, Michigan - a jarring refrain that may have cost him the Michigan Republican primary in January. (He won the Ohio primary in March, after most opponents dropped out.)
McCain says retraining is essential and proposes creating a flexible account that workers can use to pay for technical education at community colleges.
McCain has even traveled to Colombia, Canada and Mexico to defend trade deals that are political dynamite back home. He is trusting voters to understand that the world economy has changed, and if the United States is not part of future agreements, "we will find our standard of living dramatically reduced," says Portman, a former Ohio congressman and U.S. trade representative under President George W. Bush.
Obama had a more union-friendly message during the primaries in Ohio and Pennsylvania, vowing to demand environmental and labor changes in the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada or pull out. He still lost both states to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. Since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee, he has been mostly silent on trade, unless asked.
Jason Furman, Obama's economic-policy director, says the senator is focused on the impact of agreements on "American business, workers and farmers" and opposes pending deals with Colombia and South Korea.
The United States has "to be better, tougher negotiators on the world's trade stage," Obama said July 1 at a campaign event in Zanesville, Ohio. Still, he sounded like McCain when he told the voters that Americans need to be better educated to compete in the new, global economy. "Many of the jobs that have been lost in Ohio can't be traced to trade," he said.
Employment in manufacturing has been shrinking for 50 years, from a third of U.S. private-sector jobs to less than 12 percent today. Economists attribute the decline mostly to automation and productivity.
Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat who unseated an incumbent two years ago by campaigning against trade deals that he believes hurt workers, says voters are yearning for a new vision: fair trade, not free trade.
Matt Louiso, 53, president of the International Association of Machinists union local at the GE plant, says he and many of his co-workers do not know exactly what that means.
"Trade is good for some people like us, but it's bad that other American jobs are leaving the country. I'm so mixed up; I don't know who I'm going to vote for."
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