It's The Global Economy, Stupid

It's The Global Economy, Stupid
Heather Hurlburt
June 07, 2007

Heather Hurlburt is Senior Adviser to the U.S. in the World Project at the New America Foundation. She blogs at democracyarsenal.org, and was a speechwriter for President Clinton and Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Warren Christopher.

The further into the election cycle we get, the more a 1990s nostalgia creeps in among some progressives. You remember the 1990s, right? Those halcyon days when regular folks concerned themselves with health care, the stock market and “the economy, stupid,” while only elites worried about global affairs?

I don’t remember the 1990s quite like that, either. But when I see as wise and influential a progressive as E.J. Dionne writing that the fact that so much of the [June 3 Democratic] debate concentrated on international relations reflects the imposition of a false high-mindedness that sees presidential-level discussions as serious only if they focus primarily on foreign policy. This throws off the balance in our politics.

I get worried.

Telling progressive candidates to focus on domestic issues has been a longstanding staple of the political consultant’s talking points. But that’s been wrong for a while now. Wrong because many working people’s issues are international, or globalized, issues. Wrong because Americans are telling everyone who’ll listen that they want a change in how America acts in the world. And wrong because a whole class of candidates proved in 2006 that progressive candidates can make national security work for, not against, them as an issue.

Let’s take the facts first. Back in the 1990s, we Clinton administration types used to talk a lot about the connections between foreign and domestic policy. “America’s foreign policy should never be foreign to the American people,” Secretary Albright used to say. With twin boosts from accelerating globalization and Bush administration failures, that is truer than ever. The Americans who are on the front lines know, even if they can’t quite articulate why or what should be done about it, that their daily lives are intertwined with international issues.

It’s disproportionately lower- and middle-income families, from small towns and rural communities, whose kids are on the physical front lines, doing the fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. What about the men and women who serve in our National Guard and reserves, who are expected to be the frontline of homeland security and disaster response, and fill the gaps in Iraq and elsewhere, all with insufficient training and equipment? Think those people don’t want to hear about national security? Think again.

While we’re looking at rural communities, what about farmers? All are looking for predictability and profit from global markets. Many are also asking themselves how they can square their own need for farm support with what they’ve learned about the desperate needs of farmers in poorer countries.

While some white-collar and factory workers are experiencing boom times thanks to exports, others are watching jobs move overseas and wondering what anyone can do about it. All of us who live by inexpensive and easy global travel find ourselves wondering what exotic germs we might be breathing in. We look at the unprecedented array of value-priced consumer goods and ask uneasily where our pet food, toothpaste or spinach came from and what’s in it. And anyone who’s had to fill a gas tank recently probably paused to think about global oil – and not in a particularly high-minded way.

Of course, all the shouting about Iraq withdrawal dates is preventing or obscuring debate on any of these deeper issues. That is a concern that progressives of all stripes, as well as moderates and conservatives, should be able to share—that we’re having the wrong foreign policy debate.

The day after our troops leave Iraq, al Qaida and its allies will still be operating all over the world. Mass atrocities in Darfur and elsewhere will still be crying out for a response. We’ll still need a wiser and fairer trade policy, a serious plan to fight global warming and a blueprint to renovate the UN and other international institutions.

We’ll need to rebuild our own government and reconsider a budget which even the Pentagon thinks doesn’t put enough resources toward diplomacy and nonviolent responses to conflict.
Instead, we have on all sides a stale repetition of political formulas which is carrying us further away from, not closer to, real progress in closing the sorry chapter of the war in Iraq.

Let me say that again: an endless loop of internal progressive debate on Iraq serves only those who want to keep things in Iraq—and the rest of American foreign policy—exactly the way they are. But the answer is broadening the discussion beyond Iraq, not turning away and pretending national security doesn’t exist.

Remember, progressives can run and win on national security: if they have convictions, buttress them with facts, and aren’t afraid to talk about them. That’s how progressives across the spectrum, veterans and anti-war activists alike, won in ’06. Public distaste for this
Administration’s national security policies—and what they have done to America’s image in the world—has only deepened since then.

So I’m right with E.J. on throwing out false high-mindedness. In its place we need real discussions of real issues—and that includes security, globalization, energy and America’s place in the world, along with healthcare, Social Security and even “the global economy, stupid.”

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