Outsource those jobs

The defeat of John Kerry has been widely portrayed as a poke in the eye for liberal values and for prevarication in the face of global terrorism. Rather less has been made of the defeat of a third strand of Kerry philosophy: protectionism. One of the central policies of the Democrat challenger was to put a halt to ‘outsourcing’, the process whereby American companies are moving their manufacturing and some of their routine clerical operations to developing countries. This process, maintained John Kerry, was costing hard-working Americans their jobs. Making a stand against outsourcing, he calculated, would play especially well in the swing state of Ohio, where unemployment has been high in recent years due to the decline of rustbelt industries.

As we now know, Kerry’s target voters did not trust him on this issue any more than they trusted him to make decisions on moral issues or war in Iraq.