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| washingtonpost.com - Harold Meyerson -- Washington Post Opinion Writer (washi...
Harold Meyerson writes about politics and policy for The Washington Post's op-ed page.
DENVER -- Barack Obama has the problem from hell.
Just as the ghost dance of the Sioux failed to bring back the buffalo, so the declining dollar and the high price of gas have failed to bring back American manufacturing. To be sure, with the dollar down, exports are up, and with the price of shipping goods from Shenzhen to Los Angeles rising with the cost of oil, Chinese imports have slowed. Nonetheless, as the New York Times' Louis Uchitelle reported Monday, most of the rise in U.S. exports has come in corn, wheat and other agricultural commodities, not in aircraft or machinery.
On or about last Friday, the world changed. With two very different coming-out parties -- the opening ceremonies of the Olympics and the invasion of Georgia -- China and Russia put everyone on notice that the power relationships of the past have been reshuffled and that formidable new powers are challenging the established order.
For the past two weeks, John McCain's Trash Talk Express has rolled over Barack Obama, flattening the Illinois senator's lead in many national polls and directing public attention away from the fundamental political choices the nation has to make and toward Obama's allegedly elitist character. Campaigning against Democrats' allegedly elitist characters has been the Republican formula for presidential victory for the past 20 years, ever since uber-consultant Lee Atwater realized he could steer the populist sentiments of many voters against cultural rather than economic elites. The Atwater ploy often requires GOP consultants to manufacture evidence of the Democratic candidate's cultural marginality, but over the past fortnight, McCain's campaign, with its nose dive into Paris Hilton Plays the Race Card thematics, has proved equal to the task.
If there's one thing to which the world of Democratic economics is utterly unaccustomed, it's agreement. Democrats fight with each other all the time on trade. They disagree about whether to push for balanced budgets or increased spending. Some emphasize growth; others call for greater distributional fairness.
Maybe the symbolism of Barack Obama giving a major speech this week at Berlin's Victory Column -- a 19th-century monument to Prussia's military triumphs -- isn't as incongruous at it might seem. After all, it was Frederick the Great -- the 18th-century Prussian monarch who transformed his kingdom into the dominant German state -- who once advised his generals, "He who would defend everything ends up defending nothing."
"Government is not the solution to our problem," Ronald Reagan told his fellow Americans in his first inaugural address. "Government is the problem."
Doing business in China is beginning to cost real money. Not that Chinese workers are buying second homes or anything like that: Their average wage is still a little short of a dollar an hour. But so many Chinese have now left their villages for the factories that the once bottomless pool of new young workers is beginning to run dry, and the wages of assembly-line employees are rising 10 percent a year.
On a deep, uncluttered stage that stretches back to suggest pristine beaches and the boundless Pacific beyond, the young sailors and Seabees encounter a world in which nothing is familiar except themselves. White sailors on one part of the stage, black on another -- the services were still segregated during World War II -- they clamorously note a deficiency in island life from which black and white suffer alike: There aren't any dames. Well, hardly any.
On Oct. 1, 1910, a bomb set by James McNamara, an operative of the Iron Workers union, then embroiled in a ferocious dispute with the Los Angeles Times, blew up the Times building, killing 21 pressmen. McNamara was arrested the following April, convicted and later sentenced to life in prison. He died in San Quentin in 1941.
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