"Free" Trade Costs McCain Michigan

Dustin Ensinger writes:

Sen. John McCain and his presidential campaign decided to pull out of Michigan on Thursday, ceding the state’s 17 electoral votes and shifting resources to more competitive Midwestern states like Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. By pulling out of the state with arguably the nation’s poorest economy, McCain’s path to 270 electoral votes just got even more narrow.

Despite the fact that Michigan hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since George H. W. Bush in 1988, the McCain campaign had been doing relatively well in polls coming out of the traditionally blue state until the events of recent weeks brought America’s downtrodden economy into sharp focus.

One of the main reasons the campaign decided to pull out of Michigan is the fact that the economy has become the central front in the presidential race - an issue McCain has admitted is not his strong suit. Polling has consistently shown that more voters trust Sen. Barack Obama to handle the nation’s economic meltdown which has helped Obama open up a double-digit lead in the state..

The economic crisis is certainly taking its toll on the entire country, but nowhere is the failure of America’s economic policies more evident than in Michigan.

Nationally, unemployment is running at 6.1 percent, in Michigan it is over two percentage points higher at 8.9 percent - the nation’s highest unemployment rate. The auto industry, the backbone of Michigan’s economy, released a report Wednesday showing that auto sales had fallen to their lowest level in 15 years. In the past year alone, Michigan has lost 40,000 manufacturing jobs, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

To many residents of the state, the blame for their economic woes can be placed squarely at the feet of “free trade” agreements and those who support them.

Obama, while a supporter of “free trade,” is not nearly the advocate that his opponent is. During the primary season Obama was extremely critical of the North American Free Trade Agreement, threatening to pull out of the agreement if the terms were not renegotiated.

“I would immediately call the president of Mexico, the president of Canada to try to amend NAFTA because I think that we can get labor agreements in that agreement right now. And it should reflect the basic principle that our trade agreements should not just be good for Wall Street, it should also be good for Main Street,” he said. However, his voting record shows that he has a mixed record on issues of “free trade,” voting for a bilateral deal with the nation of Oman and against the Central American Free Trade Agreement.

McCain may now be paying for his “unapologetic” support of disastrous “free trade” agreements like NAFTA. During primary season McCain told a Michigan crowd that “NAFTA was a good idea.” During another campaign stop he said “Free trade is vital to the future of America. Have people lost jobs? Yes, they have, and they’re going [to] lose jobs.” In another instance he told a group of Michigan voters that some of the jobs that have left the state are not coming back.

Since the implementation of the NAFTA in 1994, Michigan has lost 60,000 jobs as a direct result of the flawed trade deal, the Economic Policy Institute said. According to their calculations those jobs would have paid an average wage of $800 per week.