Outsourcing: Should Romney embrace it?

Mitt Romney needs to stop being a “punching bag,” said David Brooks in The New York Times. For months, President Obama has been hammering the presumptive GOP nominee with charges that he shipped American jobs overseas as head of the private-equity firm Bain Capital. So far, Romney’s only responses have been the hotly debated assertion that he’d “retroactively retired” from Bain before the so-called outsourcing began, and the accusation that Obama effectively subsidized the practice by allowing stimulus funds to be invested abroad. The truth, both sides are aware, is that employing foreign workers is a perfectly legitimate way for a company to be more “efficient and dynamic” in a globalized economy. Rather than ducking the charge of outsourcing, said Michael Tanner in NationalReview.com, Romney should embrace it and offer “a full-throated defense of capitalism.” Outsourcing lets U.S. businesses make more money and U.S. consumers buy cheaper goods, and “it’s time for Mitt Romney to stand up and say so.”

Except he can’t, said Jonathan Cohn in TNR.com. Outsourcing may be a “sound, legitimate business practice” in theory. But in practice it “causes a lot of very real, very serious human pain,” especially in unemployment-blighted swing states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, which Romney badly needs to win in November. In fact, he needs the support of the GOP’s base everywhere, said David Frum in TheDailyBeast.com, and the soul of the party these days is white, nationalistic, working-class voters, who react very poorly to the thought of losing jobs to foreigners. If there’s one thing these voters hate more, or more irrationally, than Barack Obama, it’s “outsourcing—and those who do it.”

Outsourcing may be an awkward subject for Mitt Romney, said Andres Oppenheimer in The Miami Herald, but Obama’s campaign ad targeting him for it is “unfair, hypocritical, and dangerously deceptive.” The president knows that most outsourcing is done to create products to sell overseas, not to undercut American workers. Given the state of our economy, it’s “intellectually dishonest” for him to demagogue the practice. Not only is outsourcing good for America, said Clive Crook in TheAtlantic.com, it’s also good for workers in developing countries, which you’d think would be a reason for Obama to embrace the practice. Once upon a time, the Democratic Party cared about the world’s poor. Funny how, in an election year, its “concern about inequality stops at this country’s borders.”

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