It appears that the president’s global celebrity status doesn’t advance the effectiveness of environmental scolding.  The Indian government rejected Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s calls for legally binding carbon caps, lest such limits “undermine the economic growth that is necessary to lift millions more out of poverty.”

I’m sure some people in low-wage, high-energy jobs (e.g. manufacturing, mining, etc.) in the U.S. share the sentiments of the Indian government.

Now that Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign is on its deathbed, the eulogies are starting to appear.  Marie Cocco in the Post catalogs the series of sexist name-calling and belittlement Clinton faced throughout her campaign.  Though it causes little public uproar when media figures pelt misogynist epithets at Clinton, Cocco wonders what would happen had similar but racist insults been hurled at Sen. Barack Obama.

Would the silence prevail if Obama’s likeness were put on a tap-dancing doll that was sold at airports? Would the media figures who dole out precious face time to these politicians be such pals if they’d compared Obama with a character in a blaxploitation film? And how would crude references to Obama’s sex organs play?

Certainly such behavior would be scandalous, but in America race as an identity is much more sensitive than sex, and thus we are socially afforded different levels of disrespect for different identities.  Perhaps this is the result of race-consciousness, which, wishing to compensate for past transgressions (slavery, Jim Crow, etc.), places particular meaning on race.  The race-aggrieved will note that women were not enslaved for hundreds of years.  Feminists will retort that women have been enslaved since the beginning of time.  In the case of more-aggrieved-than-thou arguments, I choose not to take sides.

Clearly, though, Sen. Clinton has faced a mean, protracted, and costly campaign.  She may not be as offended as we think as she has openly admitted her excited anticipation of the mess of politics that would come.  Clinton is no shrinking violet, and therein lies the problem.

Unfortunate as it may be, the reality is that women who are assertive are frequently called “bitches” whereas equally assertive men receive social admiration.  Steadfast conviction!  Standing tough!  Staying the course!  All these have little negative connotation when applied to men, but when a woman refuses to back down (refuses to accept electoral defeat, even), she’s called a bitch.

We can avoid the issue completely if we afforded everyone the equal respect we all deserve.  However, if men were angels, as James Madison wrote, we would need no government.  Then there would be no nasty campaigns.

Two good articles from Post today.

The Manhattan Institute finds that immigrants in America adapt quickly. Though measuring economic, cultural, and civic integration is difficult, it’s useful to look at the index as a good way to compare different groups rather than interpreting 100 as a full integration (whatever that really should mean). Either way, the numbers tell a story that contrasts sharply with what one will find in the Parisian banlieues.

Despite this, sadly, there’s still plenty of racist hostility to blacks, as Sen. Obama’s campaigners are finding. It’s a story barely reported on the campaign trail over the past few months, but Sen. Clinton may have hinted at it when she discounted Obama’s electability. At first I thought she was referring to his liberal, if scant, voting record. Now I suspect she may have been referring to something else.

One can never be a Senator, a millionaire and a “regular guy”.  Senator, you’re no Joe Six-pack.  But where did these pitiful scenes of Sen. Obama bowling, Sen. Clinton downing shots, and Pres. Bush crashing his bike originate?  The Post clues us in:

Presidential candidates have strived relentlessly downward in social class ever since the 1840s, when William Henry Harrison created what historians now call the “common-man myth.” While most of his peers campaigned from their estates, Harrison traveled the country and spoke under a banner depicting a log cabin and a bottle of hard cider. He won the presidency by a landslide, and his campaign model became the new standard.

There’s the old polling questions of which candidate would you prefer to have a beer with.  Who cares?  Being a good drinking buddy and running the Executive Branch require completely different qualities.

Americans often believe that cheap gas is a constitutional right. With gas prices as high as they are these days, driving one’s SUV around one’s car-dependent suburb is becoming expensive.

To allay this pain at the pump, both Sen. Clinton and McCain have proposed suspending the Federal gas tax for the summer, a measure expected to draw praise from these motorists. Sen. Obama, however, has rightly described the gas tax suspension as a gimmick that won’t lower gas prices at all. Here are the various reasons why the gas tax suspension is a bad idea:

Ineffective Economic Gimmickry

The problem with this tax suspension, as many notable economists have explained, is that oil refiners and distributors will simply raise prices as the tax drops with hopes that nobody will notice. Furthermore, reduced prices may encourage higher consumption, thus boosting prices back up again.

Today on ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos asked Clinton “Can you name one economist, one credible economist, who supports this suspension?” (watch the exchange)

Clinton responded,

Well, you know, George, I think we’ve been for the last seven years seeing a tremendous amount of government power and elite opinion behind policies that haven’t work for the middle class and hard-working Americans.

Pressed further to name one supportive economist, Clinton dismissed the need to listen to economists about economic policy:

I’m not going to put my lot in with economists because I know that if we did it right… we would design it in such a way that it would be implemented effectively.

Apparently Sen. Clinton believes she knows better than professional economists about fuel markets. This is another instance where careful, professional economic thought is cast as “elitist” when it doesn’t tell the masses what they want to hear, specifically, that we can have our cake and eat it too.

Failure to Reduce Dependence on Oil

Though Sen. Clinton supports suspending the gas tax, she then goes on to complain about the nation’s dependence on foreign oil. Just how exactly does Sen. Clinton plan to reduce this dependence while opposing drilling in Alaska and making gas cheaper? It is impossible. Though bashing Saudi oil barons has been in vogue for several years, we must recognize that these same barons provide us with what we want: cheap oil. Without increasing domestic production or reducing domestic demand, suspending the gas tax is likely to increase consumption of foreign oil.

Encouraging Environmentally Destructive Behavior

Sen. Clinton cannot support reducing greenhouse gas emissions and support cheap gas. The latter exacerbates the former and in the unlikely event that a gas tax suspension does indeed lower gas prices, such prices will only encourage increased consumption and thus increased greenhouse gas emissions.

Dismissing the “elite opinion” of economists, Sens. Clinton and McCain float this suspension as a populist appeal to middle- and lower-class voters for whom the rise in gas prices has been particularly painful.

Politically, though, these differing positions on the Democratic side highlight a difference in the support base of the two candidates. Clinton’s base, skeptical of the “elite opinion” of economists on issues of free trade and technological innovation, are having trouble affording the drive-everywhere lifestyles to which most suburban Americans are accustomed. Furthermore, despite the green leanings of the Democratic Party, much of Clinton’s base cannot or will not sacrifice to support environmental causes.

Obama’s base, which skews toward the wealthy, has the means to buy hybrids and live in pricey, close-in enclaves where public transport is better and where good jobs are not too far away. Though Obama denies that a tax holiday will lower prices (and he’s likely right on that), it’s far easier for him to say that without alienating his base.

For consumers who actually believe the tax holiday will lower prices, Obama’s refusal to lower the tax smacks of elitism. For those of us educated with some minimal understanding of economics, our “elite opinion” is in Obama’s favor.

Fluff consumed much of tonight’s Democratic debate. Though Obama’s association with a racist pastor and Clinton’s made up stories about dodging sniper bullets make good material for reporters on a deadline, policy should have been the sole topic of the night.

One of the most disappointing moments in the recent Democratic debates came when Sens. Clinton and Obama nearly tripped over each other in a contest to denounce the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Threatening a unilateral withdrawal from NAFTA upon her increasingly unlikely election, Sen. Clinton admitted that some regions of the country do benefit from NAFTA, while others, primarily in the rust belt, suffer. Sadly, Sen. Clinton fails to explain why the economic interests of those who benefit, including American consumers, should take a back seat to the economic interests of a few rust belt manufacturers.

A recent article in the Post explains that many economists estimate that NAFTA has benefited the United States, particularly Texas:

Overall, the Texas economy has profited from NAFTA, studies have found, with manufacturers taking advantage of cuts in Mexican tariffs to send more electronics, industrial machinery, chemicals and instruments south, according to a 2006 Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas study. The same report found that the export of Texas lumber and furniture declined after NAFTA.

Though Clinton and Obama both promise to “renegotiate” NAFTA, it is unlikely that any renegotiation could reasonably be called a free-trade agreement. Both Canada and Mexico have their share of upset constituencies that would demand more protection in any deal, as would American textile mills and manufacturing unions.

American consumers benefit from cheaper goods and American farmers, particularly corn farmers, benefit from export opportunities to Mexico. One group with a particularly strong interest in protectionism is organized labor. As U.S. manufacturing output has increased steadily over the decades, the number of American employed in manufacturing has dropped. Though output is up, labor unions benefit not one bit from output increases, since their economic lifelines come from the dues of employees. Clearly the anti-trade rhetoric of Sens. Clinton and Obama will woo the hearts of union leaders.

Though Sen. McCain steadfastly supports NAFTA even in front of skeptical audiences in the rust belt, it is unlikely that a possible Democratic win in November would number the days of NAFTA. Shortly after the February debate in the video above, Canadian news outlet CTV reported that a senior Obama staff member quietly reassured Canada’s ambassador to the U.S. that Obama’s words were just to please the crowd:

The staff member reassured Wilson that the criticisms would only be campaign rhetoric, and should not be taken at face value.

The Obama campaign stood by the NAFTA-bashing, of course, but did not deny that his campaign had contacted the ambassador.

I am impressed with Sen. McCain’s defense of NAFTA, since it takes a good deal of courage to support something unpopular. His courage on this matter, though, is only admirable because he is right in his assessment on the long-term benefits of trade. Free trade is always a politically fragile issue since the benefits are subtle (decreases in costs of consumer goods), whereas the resulting job losses, even if only for a few, are obvious and painful.

Despite Ross Perot’s famous prediction that NAFTA would result in a “giant sucking sound” of U.S. jobs fleeing to Mexico, the unemployment rate in the U.S. actually declined after the agreement’s ratification. Furthermore, the biggest competitor for U.S. manufacturing jobs is not Mexico, but China, which lies outside the scope of NAFTA.

Nonetheless, NAFTA-bashing, though popular with the more xenophobic section of the electorate, is widely considered by economists to be a net benefit to America. This is probably why the Obama campaign official quietly reassured the Canadian ambassador that the senator had no plans for withdrawal.

The Clinton campaign, as I have noted, also double-talks on trade issues. It was recently revealed that Mark Penn, one of Sen. Clinton’s senior advisors, also consulted the Colombian ambassador about how to secure a U.S.-Colombia free-trade pact. Upon public revelation of this seeming double-dealing, Penn resigned. All for election-year politics. George Will explains:

Mark Penn’s sin was to be caught doing something sensible, surreptitiously. That is the only way Democrats can do sensible things regarding trade when their party is pandering to organized labor. Penn’s downfall makes him a member of a species that many Democrats insist is large and about which Democrats theatrically grieve: Penn is a casualty of free trade.

Penn’s consultations with the Colombian ambassador were to no avail. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised today to change House rules to kill the bilateral deal—a deal that she helped negotiate! The New York Times explains:

What Democrats do not want, many of them say, is a vote that would force lawmakers to choose between the labor and working-class opponents of the measure, who say that trade has cost American jobs and led to wage stagnation, and the Wall Street and manufacturing interests that favor the deal.

Interestingly the article notes that both Sens. Clinton and Obama oppose the deal (publicly, at least), “in part because labor groups say that President Álvaro Uribe of Colombia has not done a sufficient job of cracking down on anti-labor violence committed by right-wing groups.”

George Will fires back:

Colombia’s unions, however, document that the number of murders of their members has sharply declined. Edward Schumacher-Matos, visiting professor of Latin American studies at Harvard, notes that “it was far safer to be in a union than to be an ordinary citizen in Colombia last year”: The murder rate of unionists was less than one-eighth the murder rate of Colombians generally.

Sen. Clinton’s opposition to free trade is in markèd contrast to her husband’s position on trade. Though one should not expect her to adopt unswervingly the views of her husband, it is doubtful that her NAFTA threats are sincere. She is pandering to her a core constituency of union members, whom she needs to turn out in significant numbers in Pennsylvania’s upcoming primary. Be it with Mexico, Canada, or Colombia, the Democratic Party has turned against the nation’s overall best interest in trade. The Washington Post’s editorial board, certainly no bastion of conservatism, put it well:

Are [Clinton and Obama] unaware of the real statistics on NAFTA’s effects? Voters are left to wonder, and to ponder which would be worse: that the candidates are sincere and misguided or are insincere and lacking the courage to speak honestly.

Good question.