Looking up from their particular circle of Hell, Senator Reed
Smoot (R-Utah) and Representative Willis C. Hawley (R-Oregon)
must be laughing.
They must realize that President Obama
and congressional Democrats are infinitely
clever Alinsky students, saying one thing in front of the TV
cameras and then doing the opposite behind the scenes. Together,
the Obama administration and liberal lawmakers have in a
sense revived by stealth the disastrous
Smoot-Hawley tariff that exacerbated the Great Depression by
encouraging other countries to erect trade barriers.
During the election campaign, after some policy fine-tuning and
unexpected drama that took the campaign off-message, Obama
begrudgingly conditionally
endorsed free trade. Or so it seemed.
His statement came a few months after that bit of intrigue
with economic advisor Austan Goolsbee, who now serves Obama
in the White House. Goolsbee caused a furor on both sides of
the 49th Parallel by telling the Canadian consul general in
Chicago that Obama's anti-free trade rhetoric was just the
candidate playing up to his left-wing base. Goolsbee
said Obama's words were "more reflective of political
maneuvering than policy," Fortune reported.
Then, after blasting NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement)
as "devastating" and "a big mistake," Obama
backtracked. "Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets
overheated and amplified," he conceded to a Fortune
reporter last summer. "Politicians are always guilty of that, and
I don't exempt myself," he said.
Of course Obama also needed to genuflect before Big Labor
and Big Green so he added the potentially critical proviso
that he favors "opening up a dialogue" with trading partners
Mexico and Canada "and figuring out how we can make this
work for all people."
It was enough to get most of his trade policy critics
to back off.
And it was all for show.
Now we learn, courtesy of the
Washington Post no less, that buried deep in the
must-pass-right-now-or-the-Apocalypse-will-come stimulus package
from February there was a hidden trade bill. (The stimulus
legislation also erased the Clinton era welfare reforms, but
that's another story.)
The stimulus package's "buy American" provisions applying to
funding recipients have been denounced even
by the loathsome Toronto Star (known in
Canadian conservative circles as the Red Star) as part
of "a plague of protectionist measures in the U.S."
Too bad, Toronto
Star. Perhaps you shouldn't have endorsed Obama. The
November 2, 2008 editorial lauded Obama's "fairer tax structure
[that] helps working families and small business," and his tax
hikes in some areas "to fund health care, education,
infrastructure, green initiatives and the military."
Meanwhile, protectionism has come to America, and only now have
we begun to notice.
