Friday, March 28, 2008
Obama's Ohio Blame Game
NRO's Stephen Spruell points up the latest Obama Deception. In his Ohio Primary campaign, Barack Oblabama blamed the failure of a major Ohio employer on free and open trade:
In the days leading up to the March 4 Ohio primary, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign aired a TV ad that featured a man named Steven Schuyler standing in front of a Delphi Packard Electric plant in Warren, Ohio. In the ad, Schuyler says he worked for Delphi, an automotive supplier, for 13 years until NAFTA enabled the company to ship his job to Mexico. “Barack Obama was against NAFTA,” Schuyler says, adding, “We need a president that will bring work into this country.”Obama's campaign thrives on victimhood, which is why he used the whiner in his commercial. The fact is that Delphi was exsanguinated by market forces and union demands. Shit happens in the free market, yo, Obamalina or not.
The Delphi ad might qualify as the most deceptive of the 2008 race. First, Delphi did not exist as an independent company when Congress passed NAFTA in 1993. It was part of General Motors until it was spun off as an independent supplier in 1999. Second, foreign competition did not drive the company to eliminate American jobs. It declared bankruptcy in 2005 because the legacy labor costs it inherited from GM made it impossible to compete against other U.S.-based suppliers. Third, workers at the Warren, Ohio plant were offered generous buyouts and early-retirement packages. Its employees were not just kicked to the street.