The Audacity of Hope

years, based on their promise to stay. But it’s never enough. Some CEO who’s already
making millions of dollars decides he needs to boost the company stock price so he can
cash in his options, and the easiest way to do that is to send the work to Mexico and pay
the workers there a sixth of what we make.”
I asked them what steps state or federal agencies had taken to retrain workers, and
almost in unison the room laughed derisively. “Retraining is a joke,” the union vice
president, Doug Dennison, said. “What are you going to retrain for when there aren’t
any jobs out there?” He talked about how an employment counselor had suggested that
he try becoming a nursing aide, with wages not much higher than what Wal-Mart paid
their floor clerks. One of the younger men in the group told me a particularly cruel
story: He had made up his mind to retrain as a computer technician, but a week into his
courses, Maytag called him back. The Maytag work was temporary, but according to the
rules, if this man refused to accept Maytag’s offer, he’d no longer be eligible for
retraining money. If, on the other hand, he did go back to Maytag and dropped out of
the courses he was already taking, then the federal agency would consider him to have
used up his one-time training opportunity and wouldn’t pay for any retraining in the
future.
I told the group that I’d tell their story during the campaign and offered a few proposals
that my staff had developed—amending the tax code to eliminate tax breaks for
companies who shifted operations offshore; revamping and better funding federal
retraining programs. As I was getting ready to go, a big, sturdy man in a baseball cap
spoke up. He said his name was Tim Wheeler, and he’d been the head of the union at
the nearby Butler steel plant. Workers had already received their pink slips there, and
Tim was collecting unemployment insurance, trying to figure out what to do next. His
big worry now was health-care coverage.
“My son Mark needs a liver transplant,” he said grimly. “We’re on the waiting list for a
donor, but with my health-care benefits used up, we’re trying to figure out if Medicaid
will cover the costs. Nobody can give me a clear answer, and you know, I’ll sell
everything I got for Mark, go into debt, but I still…” Tim’s voice cracked; his wife,
sitting beside him, buried her head in her hands. I tried to assure them that we would
find out exactly what Medicaid would cover. Tim nodded, putting his arm around his
wife’s shoulder.
On the drive back to Chicago, I tried to imagine Tim’s desperation: no job, an ailing
son, his savings running out.
Those were the stories you missed on a private jet at forty thousand feet.
YOU’LL GET LITTLE argument these days, from either the left or the right, with the
notion that we’re going through a fundamental economic transformation. Advances in
digital technology, fiber optics, the Internet, satellites, and transportation have
effectively leveled the economic barriers between countries and continents. Pools of
capital scour the earth in search of the best returns, with trillions of dollars moving
across borders with only a few keystrokes. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the
institution of market-based reforms in India and China, the lowering of trade barriers,