Political Irony

It is ironic that rising oil costs will finally do what global warming or even a tanking US economy could not do — slow down or even reverse globalization. Transportation costs have been so low for so long, people in the US don’t even notice anymore that hardly anything they buy in Wal-Mart is made in the USA.

When a US company decides to manufacture something overseas instead of here, they are making a purely financial decision, and most of that decision hinges on labor versus transportation costs. The question asked by the company is: can I pay people low enough wages in another country to overcome the cost of transporting things there and back. Until recently, the answer has been (mostly) yes, leading to rampant globalization.

Take the example of Tesla motors, a company just starting to manufacture electric-powered cars. Originally, the company was going to manufacture their heavy batteries in Thailand, ship them to Britain for installation, and then ship the entire cars back to the US for final assembly and sales. But in an ironic twist, the same rising oil costs that made their cars desirable in the first place is also shattering their plans for a global supply chain. Tesla will now build the battery packs and assemble the cars near their headquarters in California. Avoiding transportation costs saved them more than enough money to compensate for higher wages in the US.

Another example is IKEA, the Swedish furniture giant, who opened their first factory in the US in May so they wouldn’t have to ship all their products into the US. This trend toward manufacturing locally also works on smaller scales. For example, electronics companies are moving manufacturing facilities from China to Mexico in order to lower transportation costs. And even within the US, locally grown food can cost significantly less because of lower shipping expenses.

Reducing the distances that goods are transported not only reduces costs, but also means less greenhouse gases and other pollutants, a significant benefit. Not only that, but it leads to more local jobs. For example, in the US, steel production is rising after decades of decline.

From the NY Times.

Most politicians have figured out that it backfires when you say something racist (the Republican Party has even issued rules to try to avoid future “Macaca moments”). The trick, however, is to somehow appeal to racist fears while not appearing to actually be racist.

For example, in 2006, the Republicans ran a now-infamous negative TV ad against black Senate candidate Harold Ford. For the most part it was a typical negative political ad, but it accused him of taking porn money and ended with a young white woman winking salaciously and saying “Harold, call me”. The result was devastating.  Ford was ahead before the ad ran, but his campaign plummeted and he lost the election. The moral? Putting black men in the same ad as sexy white woman scares the pants off some voters.

Fast forward to 2008, and the Republicans are running a new ad containing Obama and young white women like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Note that neither of these women have anything to do with Obama, and both have gotten quite a bit of media attention for their sexual exploits. The Republicans can claim that they are just trying to compare Obama to other “top” celebrities, so they have plausible deniability.

But here’s the interesting bit. When Obama complained about this ad, McCain’s campaign manager snapped back “Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck.” Ignore for a moment that McCain is blaming the target of his own ad for playing the race card. The more interesting point is that McCain’s response is almost exactly the same as a famous quote from lawyer Robert Shapiro “Not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck.” As you may remember, Shapiro was talking about how they won the O.J. Simpson trial, where a black man was accused of killing a white woman.

Coincidence?  Or just blatant irony?

UPDATE: Bob Herbert in the NY Times has the answer.

UPDATE 2: The Brits have a term for this kind of message — they call it a “dog whistle”. Just like a real dog whistle is a whistle that only dogs can hear, in politics, a “dog whistle” sends a message that only a certain constituency will hear or understand.

Who says that McCain doesn’t understand the Internet. Well, come to think of it, he doesn’t. But he seems to have found a new way to get free airplay for his political ads. Simply fill them with lies about your opponent!

Then the liberal blog-o-sphere will endlessly analyze your ads, your opponent will have to respond to them, morning shows will titter about them, and so on. This pushes them out to many times more viewers than originally saw them on TV, and at no cost. After all, a candidate who has to hold a campaign event in a German restaurant when his opponent is giving a speech to 200,000 people in Germany probably has to settle for running ads in the late night slot on minor cable channels.

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