Some of those who perform calculations with pledged delegate counts say that Sen. Hillary Clinton didn’t even come close to closing the gap between her and Sen. Barack Obama with her big win in Ohio and narrow edge in Texas on Tuesday.
Even so, it was depressing to see her still in the contest, spinning away. Not that either candidate made much sense about the North American Free Trade Agreement in their Ohio debate. Both blamed NAFTA for the loss of Buckeye State manufacturing jobs.
Go back to 1992, and there was H. Ross Perot warning about the “giant sucking sound” of jobs going to Mexico if NAFTA were approved.
However, if Mexico now has those jobs, why have millions of Mexicans made their way, legally or illegally, into this country? If there was plenty of good-paying factory work there, why would they go to the trouble of moving here?
So where have these industries gone? They used to make tires in Ohio. We just bought a new set for our little Geo Prizm. The tires came from Korea, not Akron or Chihuahua. If you want to blame trade policies for a decline in American manufacturing jobs, there’s likely a case to be made — but that case cannot be made by blaming Korean tires on a treaty with Canada and Mexico.
The two campaign operations illustrate a divide in the Democratic Party. Up until recently, it was a coastal party, if you make the Great Lakes a coast and cede the shoreline from Virginia to Texas. But party chairman Howard Dean has tried to change that with his “50-state strategy,” putting staff and organization throughout the country.
It struck me as a good idea to compete everywhere, and in 2006 Democrats certainly picked up in red zones like the Interior West.
But it wasn’t popular with some segments of the party. Clinton strategist Paul Begala accused Dean of “hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose.”
And even if Obama won in Colorado and many other states, Mark Penn, a major honcho for the Clinton campaign, asked, “Could we possibly have a nominee who hasn’t won any of the significant states, outside of Illinois?”
Now it may be true, in the big sweep of things, that we live in an insignificant state. But it is nonetheless insulting to hear that from someone running a national campaign.
Further, if a party wants to be viable nationally, it needs to care about races for state legislators, governor, and the U.S. House and Senate, even in an insignificant state like ours.
Or maybe it doesn’t make that much difference. We elect a Democrat to the U.S. Senate, and he supports torture and immunity for telephone companies that assist in illegal wiretaps.
We elect a Democratic legislature, and a bill to elect water conservancy district boards, which would eliminate an onerous form of taxation without representation, is killed by a 10-3 vote in committee.
A Boulder Democrat, Rep. Alice Madden, has proposed limitations on our open-records laws; this is hard to construe as a step toward honest and transparent government.
Last week, the Senate State Affairs Committee killed a bill that would have prevented our state fair from requiring participants to register in the “voluntary” National Animal Identification System, which is generally loathed by small agricultural producers. The bill had passed the House, but Democrats in the Senate apparently forgot that some party is supposed to be looking out for the little guy.
So what the hell. If Clinton’s people take over the Democratic Party and a neglected Colorado goes back to being run by Republicans, it may not matter all that much. After all, Coloradans are not significant.
Ed Quillen (ed@cozine.com) is a freelance writer, history buff, publisher of Colorado Central Magazine in Salida and frequent contributor to The Post.
