In Indiana, according to Census data, workers clocking in at 9:00 a.m. and clocking out at 5:00 p.m. can expect an average annual household income of $50,532.
That’s a decent, hard-earned, income. It’s also in the neighborhood of what Sen. Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., earned in 2016 dividends from his local, family business that ships Hoosier jobs to Mexico, according to a damning report from the Associated Press.
No one should begrudge Donnelly for his business acumen. Instead, they should condemn him for his rank hypocrisy.
By the time Donnelly started condemning Carrier, the now-famous air conditioning and furnace maker, for moving an Indiana plant to Mexico, his own company had been capitalizing on cheaper Central American labor. “For more than a year, Stewart Superior Corp. and its subsidiaries have been shipping thousands of pounds of raw material to Mexico,” the AP reports, “where the company has a factory that produces ink pads and other supplies.”
That’s especially damning for Donnelly considering his condemnation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Donnelly was lining his pockets with cheap-labor profits while speaking against free trade to keep his seat in Congress.
“Outsourcing,” Indiana voters will remember Donnelly first saying in 2004, is just “a fancy term for ‘someone in Indiana has just lost their job.'” Now they’ll realize that, to Donnelly, outsourcing is best business practice.
Even before news broke of his business dealings, Donnelly was already vulnerable. The Democrat will run for re-election in 2018 in a state that Donald Trump earned more than 57 percent of the vote in, beating Hillary Clinton by 20 percentage points. He’s been a vocal critic of the president and, as the Washington Examiner first reported, he fundraised off of Obamacare the day that half of Indiana’s insurers fled the healthcare exchanges.
Running like a Northeast liberal in deep-red state was hard enough. Exposed as the sort of globalist he loved to hate publicly will make re-election even harder. No doubt Republican Reps. Todd Rokita and Luke Messer, who have expressed interest in the seat, hope the report ends his political career altogether.
And there’s a real chance it will. While the story barely made a blip in the national news, local television and papers are running with the story.
All politics is local. Manufacturing workers in places like Fort Wayne, Ind., won’t forget that politician Donnelly said one thing while businessman Donnelly did another.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
