Americans are angry,” said John McCain, while debating with opponent Barack Obama, in their last scheduled face-to-face televised debate confrontation, “and they have every reason to be angry.”
But Americans aren’t the only people angry with America. A lot of people around the world feel the same way - and in some sense rightly so. Our elite political and business establishments have not only screwed up the US economy, they have hurt the world economy as well.
For years we have been preaching to other countries about the near-religious virtues of management accountability and financial transparency, not to mention the need for rigorous quality control of export products.
And then we permitted our elites to leech investment money out of honest pockets, construct and then package mortgages like proverbial houses of cards, and then peddle toxic investment products worldwide under the glossy fog of complexity and ambiguity.
It was anything but an entirely scurrilous assertion when, recently, a top official in China’s central bank blamed rich nations of the West for triggering the current global economic turmoil.
The US government and elite, which have been lambasting Beijing for years for keeping its currency inflated and un-convertible, really had nothing to say in response. What could they?
Both McCain and Obama offer the prospect of better governance, to be sure. It is a widely held view here that the nation and the world would be much better off with either one in the White House than the one who is there now. The American news media in general greatly favour Obama, obviously.
The reasons are not necessarily ideological (that is, he’s a liberal, while the former Vietnam War prisoner is not). After all, Obama speaks better, holds himself with more presidential heft and, of course, bodes to become our first President of colour. And these are important things.
But worldwide viewers should also note the tendency of our news media to fall in love with the “good guy” and defend their new boy with evident cynicism and criticism towards everything his opponent would say or do.
A case in point was the issue of protectionism. Commendably, McCain portrayed himself as a free-trader and apparently felt no need to qualify or footnote. By contrast, Obama, coming from America’s hard-hit Midwest, raised the issue of our economic relations overseas in a way that our friends across the globe could find troubling, even angry-making.
In an Obama administration, the Democratic candidate announced, tax breaks for American companies “shipping jobs overseas” would be curtailed. I don’t know about you, but this comment made me edgy.
There are better, less punitive ways to deal with the phenomenon of American companies seeking to gain control over their labour costs — but the other night Obama did not put any out there.
Obama also expressed sharp dismay that Japanese and Korean manufacturers have been so proficient in developing and marketing energy-efficient cars in the US; that China was still “manipulating” its currency, and that some Free-Trade-Agreements (as with Columbia) were a bad deal for America.
Alas, McCain was not, for some inexplicable reason, able to rejoin with some obvious points. One is that Congressional approval of the pending free-trade agreement with South Korea would open up the market for American cars (Obama Democrats are against it).
Another is that in the current worldwide financial crisis, China should consider itself perhaps justified in having protected its national coin from Western sharks and market turbulence. Finally, America’s trade negotiators — in both the Bush and Clinton administrations — have been anything but pushovers in all of these tough bilateral negotiations.
Sure — let’s give Obama his due. For the third consecutive time, the Illinois Senator “won” the debate, especially on style (shades, perhaps, of “Slick Willy,” as Bill Clinton used to be called). Every poll in this country shows now Obama winning this election as it moves to the end. Indeed, if we opened the contest to the voters of the world, the Illinois Democrat would win by an even larger margin, presumably.
But he is not right on every issue, and McCain is not wrong on every issue.
Why has Obama not gotten the trade issue as right as McCain? It’s simple: the Democratic Party includes unions and human rights groups that often work against lower trading barriers, for various reasons (some much better than others). Obama is a Democrat.
A Democratic White House will definitely complicate the international-trade picture. And this would come at a time in world history when the worst medicine for the global economy would be a push — not to mention a rush — in the direction of a new American protectionism.
Tom Plate is a veteran US journalist who in one way or the other has been commenting on US presidential elections since 1980