Barack Obama's Freudian Slip

President Barack Obama had a surprising slip of the tongue during a speech at Kent State University. “I want to see us export more jobs. Uh, export more products.” To the delight and amusement of his supporters, he cleverly corrected himself: “Excuse me, I was channeling my opponent there for a second,” he joked.

But what if that slip was more than a simple blunder? Obama is the heir to a Democratic tradition that has long promoted the massive exportation of American products and jobs in the name of economic competitiveness and mass consumption. In the book “Pivotal Decade,” historian Judith Stein describes how U.S. industrial jobs in the 1970s were dumped in favor of financial and economic deregulation.

Since the 1950s, Democrats have accepted the inevitable decline of the industrial base and have supported the free market and the deregulation that goes along with it. It was a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, elected in 1992, who was responsible for the NAFTA treaty, which created a free trade zone with Canada and Mexico. We can also thank him for the deregulation of banking and financial products. China has become the scapegoat for both candidates, but should job loss and the resulting unease amongst the working and lower-middle classes come as any surprise?

The fate of a company like the Radio Corporation of America is an illustration of this industrial policy. Established in 1919, the company created jobs in Camden, N.J., and sold radios, then televisions to the American market. The 1929 crisis led to a shift in production toward the Midwest, then the South, in order to take advantage of cheap labor and weak unions. It was bought out in 1986 by the Thomson Group, which then turned toward Mexico.

During this time of economic crisis, the offshoring of production and fear of emerging markets have become major issues in the campaign. If President Barack Obama is to criticize businessman Mitt Romney’s disastrous economic record on the issue, he must not forget the inconsistencies in the industrial policy that his own party has supported for years.