Obama and the road ahead

As I wrote down below in my Catching my eye feature this morning, I thought Barack Obama’s commencement address at Knox College was quite good and I wanted to say a little more about it. First off, this is a very nice bit:

As a servant in Rome, you knew you’d spend your life forced to build somebody else’s Empire. As a peasant in 11th Century China, you knew that no matter how hard you worked, the local warlord might come and take everything you had—and you also knew that famine might come knocking at the door. As a subject of King George, you knew that your freedom of worship and your freedom to speak and to build your own life would be ultimately limited by the throne.

And then America happened.

A place where destiny was not a destination, but a journey to be shared and shaped and remade by people who had the gall, the temerity to believe that, against all odds, they could form “a more perfect union” on this new frontier.

That’s as nice an expression of American exceptionalism as I’ve seen recently and I’m particularly glad to hear it framed by a Democrat. I’ve been hearing too many “Buts” and “Whereases” lately. Not that we’re free from flaws:

Have we failed at times? Absolutely. Will you occasionally fail when you embark on your own American journey? You surely will. But the test is not perfection.

The true test of the American ideal is whether we’re able to recognize our failings and then rise together to meet the challenges of our time. Whether we allow ourselves to be shaped by events and history, or whether we act to shape them. Whether chance of birth or circumstance decides life’s big winners and losers, or whether we build a community where, at the very least, everyone has a chance to work hard, get ahead, and reach their dreams.

There’s a little Democratic Party cheerleading:

When the irrational exuberance of the Roaring Twenties came crashing down with the stock market, we had to decide: do we follow the call of leaders who would do nothing, or the call of a leader who, perhaps because of his physical paralysis, refused to accept political paralysis?

We chose to act—regulating the market, putting people back to work, expanding bargaining rights to include health care and a secure retirement–and together we rose.

When World War II required the most massive homefront mobilization in history and we needed every single American to lend a hand, we had to decide: Do we listen to skeptics who told us it wasn’t possible to produce that many tanks and planes? Or, did we build Roosevelt’s Arsenal for Democracy and grow our economy even further by providing our returning heroes with a chance to go to college and own their own home?

A little straining at history, there, but still pretty good. He acknowledges the challenges of globalization:

As Tom Friedman points out in his new book, The World Is Flat, over the last decade or so, these forces—technology and globalization—have combined like never before. So that while most of us have been paying attention to how much easier technology has made our own lives—sending e-mails back and forth on our blackberries, surfing the Web on our cell phones, instant messaging with friends across the world—a quiet revolution has been breaking down barriers and connecting the world’s economies. Now business not only has the ability to move jobs wherever there’s a factory, but wherever there’s an internet connection.

Countries like India and China realized this. They understand that they no longer need to be just a source of cheap labor or cheap exports. They can compete with us on a global scale. The one resource they needed were skilled, educated workers. So they started schooling their kids earlier, longer, with a greater emphasis on math and science and technology, until their most talented students realized they don’t have to come to America to have a decent life—they can stay right where they are.

I think he should have been a little more cautious in holding up China and India as models. China has neither a national health care system nor a national pension system. And not much in the way of private health insurance or private pension plans, either. He proceeds by contrasting the “Ownership Society” proposals of the Bush Administration:

Like so much of the American story, once again, we face a choice. Once again, there are those who believe that there isn’t much we can do about this as a nation. That the best idea is to give everyone one big refund on their government—divvy it up by individual portions, in the form of tax breaks, hand it out, and encourage everyone to use their share to go buy their own health care, their own retirement plan, their own child care, their own education, and so on.

In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society. But in our past there has been another term for it—Social Darwinism—every man or woman for him or herself. It’s a tempting idea, because it doesn’t require much thought or ingenuity. It allows us to say that those whose health care or tuition may rise faster than they can afford—tough luck. It allows us to say to the Maytag workers who have lost their job—life isn’t fair. It let’s us say to the child who was born into poverty—pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And it is especially tempting because each of us believes we will always be the winner in life’s lottery, that we’re the one who will be the next Donald Trump, or at least we won’t be the chump who Donald Trump says: “You’re fired!”

with his presumed alternatives:

What if we prepared every child in America with the education and skills they need to compete in the new economy? If we made sure that college was affordable for everyone who wanted to go? If we walked up to those Maytag workers and we said “Your old job is not coming back, but a new job will be there because we’re going to seriously retrain you and there’s life-long education that’s waiting for you—the sorts of opportunities that Knox has created with the Strong Futures scholarship program.

What if no matter where you worked or how many times you switched jobs, you had health care and a pension that stayed with you always, so you all had the flexibility to move to a better job or start a new business? What if instead of cutting budgets for research and development and science, we fueled the genius and the innovation that will lead to the new jobs and new industries of the future?

This is where he begins to lose me. It sounds like President Clinton’s praise for “knowledge workers” in his speech in 1996 announcing the Next Generation Internet Initiative. The problem, of course, was that in a highly-connected Internet world knowledge workers paid $1 per hour were just as available as knowledge workers making $25 per hour and these jobs have gone to Bangalore.

Now I rejoice in the people of India having a better way of life as the result of globalization but I’m concerned about my own country, too.

When you examine the employment and wage picture in the United States for the last several years, you find that the greatest number of jobs and the greatest growth in wages come in the most highly regulated, licensed, and government-subsidized sectors: government itself, health care, and education. I dispute the claim that these sectors are prospering because of improved training. They’re prospering because of protectionism.

I’m not saying that Obama is advocating protectionism. I’m saying that he, the Bush Administration, and the Clinton Administration before them are all misreading the actual facts on the ground. If it’s only the protected jobs that can expect job security and higher wages (as has been largely the case), more job training or re-training won’t provide either one. Only more protection will.

But rather than advocating increased protectionism, I’d like to urge Senator Obama and all Democrats and Republicans to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to encourage growth in job numbers and wages in areas that aren’t protected. Because those are the actual roads ahead: either we’ll have a deteriorating standard of living in this country, or we’ll have job and wage growth in areas that aren’t protected, or we’ll protect more jobs (as the French seem to want to do). And, believe me, if the standard of living deteriorates too far those who are protected now won’t retain their protections for long.