| Bush hits back at democrats on jobs { March 10 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active) http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1078381676467&p=1012571727088http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1078381676467&p=1012571727088
Bush hits back at Democrats on jobs By James Harding in Cleveland, Ohio, and Edward Alden in Washington Published: March 10 2004 20:04 | Last Updated: March 10 2004 20:04 President George W. Bush on Wednesday staked out a firm election-year defence of economic globalisation, travelling to a state hard hit by manufacturing job losses to denounce Democratic attacks on the "offshoring" of US jobs.
After several months of adminstration floundering on the issue, Mr Bush told an audience of women entrepreneurs in Cleveland: "I want the world to buy America.
"Instead of building barriers to trade, we must break down those barriers.
"The old policy of economic isolationism is a recipe for economic disaster," he added. "America has moved beyond that tired defeatist mindset and we're not going back."
The speech was the opening salvo in a co-ordinated campaign to respond to Democratic charges that the disappearance of some US jobs to low-wage countries was damaging the economy, administration officials said on Wednesday.
It contrasted sharply with earlier uncertainty in the administration over economic policy. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the president's Council of Economic advisors, was harshly criticised by many senior Republicans for saying earlier this year that outsourcing jobs was good for the US economy.
Wednesday's robustly worded speech was aimed at persuading voters that economic openness had been a source of the country's growth and prosperity, and that Democratic efforts to restrict the movement of jobs abroad would hurt the economy.
"There are obviously concerns in our changing economy about jobs going overseas and that's why the president will outline what is a better way to strengthen our economy and create jobs here at home," Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said on Wednesday before the speech.
Ohio is one of the most keenly-watched battleground states of the 2004 election.
The president pointed out that Honda, the Japanese carmaker, employs 16,000 people in the state, and that another 6.4m Americans across the country "draw their paychecks" from foreign companies. Since launch of the North American free trade agreement in 1994, Ohio's exports to Mexico had tripled, he added.
Mr Bush won Ohio by a 3.5 percentage point margin in 2000 and no Republican has made a successful bid for the White House without winning the state. But unemployment in Ohio has risen from 3.9 per cent when Mr Bush took office to 6.2 per cent in January.
Advisers to John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, have grown concerned in recent days that the White House has sought to recast the Democrats as isolationists. A senior Kerry aide denied that the Democratic challenger was a protectionist, but said that the economic climate in America would not allow Washington to sign "future trade agreements without decent labour and environmental standards".
Mr Bush's defence of free trade is tempered, however, with support for programmes to help workers who lose their jobs. In his speech, he said the administration had "a responsibility to help" by providing job retraining. "We're not going to make the same mistake we made during Nafta, where no one acknowledged the costs of change," said a US trade official.
The administration is likely to support, for example, Senate legislation introduced this week by Democratic senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, and Norm Coleman, a Minnesota Republican, that would extend retraining and other assistance programmes to service-sector workers whose jobs are moved abroad. The budget for the programme, known as trade adjustment assistance, was tripled last year to $1.2bn, but is currently restricted to manufacturing workers.
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