Nominating Rip Van Winkle for President
As most schoolchildren know, Washington Irving's tale of Rip Van Winkle tells of a colonial American farmer who went off into the Catskill Mountains one day and was mystically entranced by spirits and put into a 20-year sleep. Returning to his village after his nap he finds a different world. It's Election Day, something he's never experienced before. He'd slept through the Revolutionary War and America's independence from Britain. Today a striking Rip Van Winkle quality to the trade rhetoric has prevailed in the Democratic presidential debate. Much like the many revolutionary political changes that occurred during Rip's nap, Americans in 2004 have lived through twenty years of profound economic revolution that has dramatically improved the way businesses do business and people live their lives. Yet the apparent Democratic presidential nominee, Senator John Kerry, increasingly sounds like a modern-day Rip Van Winkle. In fact, before Senator John Edwards dropped out of the race, the two were locked in a battle over the claim to Van Winkle's legacy. It was as though they had both slept through the remarkable technological and economic advances America has made over the past two decades, and instead made oaths of allegiance to the old economy.
Harken back to the campaign of 1984. The following quote is from Walter Mondale's nomination acceptance speech:
"When the American economy leads the world, the jobs are here, the prosperity is here for our children. But that's not what's happening today. This is the worst trade year in American history. Three million of our best jobs have gone overseas."
This and other anti-trade tirades tried to invoke fear in American workers based on their inability to compete with Europe and Japan. But we now know that Sen. Mondale's dire predictions proved wrong. The American dream didn't die, and Japan didn't take over the world economy.
In fact, over the past two decades the U.S. economy created 40 million new jobs, mostly in high-paying business and professional service sectors. Real median household income increased by thirty percent, and exports tripled in value. American business underwent a revolution in computer software and hardware, telecommunications, transportation and delivery, and finance.
After such a remarkable period of economic growth, fostered by trade expansion and improvements in technology, Americans should be amazed that the same ridiculous predictions of economic collapse are back again.
In a recent television appearance, Senator Kerry channeled the spirit of Walter Mondale saying: "People are worried about their wages, their jobs, about how we're going to compete with other countries, where we're losing countless numbers of jobs for those countries."
These remarks miss an important reality of our dynamic economy. New jobs are constantly being created. A full 25 percent of all working Americans are employed in categories of jobs that didn't even exist just 35 years ago. And the majority of new jobs created in America have been in high-wage, high-tech sectors.
Like the citizens of the new State of New York who had an obligation to bring Rip Van Winkle up to speed on his new world, we must do the same with Sen. Kerry and those who have taken the same position.
From 1984 to 2004 American companies like Citigroup, Hewlett Packard, Home Depot, Intel, Wal-Mart and Walt Disney became part of the corporate elite. Overnight and express delivery services exploded. The Internet became a place of business, with eBay, Yahoo, Amazon and Google being born. The buzz words of the new economy became phrases like "just-in-time delivery," "supply chain management," "information management," and "customer relations." Business was increasingly about adding value to raw materials and basic goods through skilled service jobs. In short, American workers used their unique skills to create high-paying new professions and a whole new kind of economy.
Our leaders should tap into the tremendous resource that is the American worker through increased education and job re-training, rather than use scare tactics to convince workers to cling to less prosperous Old Economy jobs that may not be sustainable into the future. The economy is changing, and when American workers and businesses adapt to those changes and compete, they win.
America has a lot to lose if a President Van Winkle were to make the mistake of ignoring the past 20 years and trying to rescind our remarkable achievements by resurrecting predictions of economic disaster. The debate over the future of the U.S. economy should focus on how to expand upon the policies that brought about such positive change, not how to destroy them.
