Donald Trump has undeniably brought the issue of trade with China to the national stage. With Trump’s good odds at becoming the GOP nominee, down-ballot candidates in the House and the Senate are indeed having to grapple with a changed landscape.
Consider Ohio.
Ohio is home to one of the GOP’s most vulnerable Senate incumbents, Rob Portman, who was George W. Bush’s trade representative. Ohio’s other senator is Sherrod Brown, who is but one tick to the right of Bernie Sanders, and author of the book Myths of Free Trade: Why American Trade Policy Has Failed.
Challenging Portman, who recently announced his opposition to the Trans Pacific Partnership, is former governor Ted Strickland. Strickland hit Portman for his opposition to the TPP, saying “For decades, Senator Rob Portman has turned his back on Ohio’s workers every chance he got — prioritizing China’s interests at the expense of our working families.”
He’s even gone so far as to run an ad calling Portman “The best senator China has ever had.”
Strickland, after being put out of a job by John Kasich in 2010, has been biding his time as president of the liberal Center for American Progress Action Fund, all the while serving on the governor’s council of the oddly named “Bipartisan Policy Center.”
Bashing free trade has always been popular in Ohio as an easy way to explain away its economic woes, and with the rise of Trump and Sanders, it’s not a bad line of attack for Strickland to take. But unlike Sherrod Brown, Ted Strickland has a history of being pro free trade with China.
As governor, Strickland opened up a trade office in Beijing, telling the Cincinnati Enquirer: “This is consistent with our department of development’s efforts to expand trade around the world…”
While he was a member of the House of Representatives, Strickland voted twice to give China the coveted “most favored nation” status. Which, of course, is odd since Strickland has attacked others, including Portman, for doing the same thing.
And, in his last few years as a member of the House, Strickland opposed efforts to hold China accountable on trade. One measure, which Strickland opposed not once but twice, would have created “mechanisms to ensure that China abides by previous trade agreement commitments, including creating a system to monitor compliance with trade obligations on intellectual property rights, market access for U.S. goods, services and agriculture and the accounting of Chinese subsidies.”
Before getting sent to the unemployment line (with no Trade Adjustment Assistance benefits), Strickland was shamed by the Akron Beacon Journal for his hypocrisy on trade issues while running a losing campaign against Kasich:
Yes, Strickland was ahead of the curve… sharing Donald Trump’s worldview that we can live in imagination land where exports thrive, and the evil imports from China are taxed to the hilt with no retaliatory repercussions from trading partners. Even trade skeptical Ohioans didn’t buy Strickland’s snake oil, and sent him packing. Lee Fisher, his lt. governror, served as a sacrificial lamb to Portman in 2010, losing 57 to 39 in a Senate bid.
Portman, who has made the issue of China’s manipulation of currency (which, to be fair, America does too) a pet issue, is fighting back with a new ad.
In addition to Strickland’s two votes against enforcement mechanisms on trade with China, Portman goes after a $4 million dollar loan Ohio made under Strickland to a solar energy company that was based in Toledo. The firm was founded by Deng Xunming, a China-born U.S. citizen.
In 2010, after getting lots of taxpayers dollars, Xunlight opened a plant in China with twice the production capacity as its Ohio facility.
It was a bad investment by Strickland.
As the Wall Street Journal observed:
The firm, Xunlight, is now defunct due to bankruptcy. According to the Toledo Blade, the now-liquidated firm filed for Chapter 7 with “$1.9 million in assets but $28.5 million in debts.” Among those debts? “More than $7 million is owed to several state agencies…”
The Blade further observed: “The university wasn’t the only public entity to help Xunlight. In 2010, the company received $34.5 million in tax credits as part of the stimulus bill. U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D., Toledo) helped secure nearly $3 million in federal earmarks for the company.”
Sources close to the Portman campaign tell THE WEEKLY STANDARD that Portman’s ad attacking Strickland’s China hypocrisy is the first volley of many to come.
In Ohio, it’s easy to demagogue on trade if you have the record to prove it. And Ted Strickland clearly doesn’t. The fight for Ohio won’t just be over presidential electoral college votes: Those Republicans down ballot aren’t going down without a fight.
One wouldn’t be surprised if Portman adopted Trump’s derogatory moniker: Lyin’ Ted.
