Do Any Candidates Really Control Their Public Images?

Today on NRO

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: How mansion-dwelling, carbon-spewing cutthroat capitalists can still be politically correct. The Valley of the Shadow.

THE EDITORS: There is no religious exemption for Obama's LGBT executive order. Contractors and the Culture War.

JILLIAN KAY MELCHIOR: Recipients are withdrawing thousands in cash at pot dispensaries, and Republicans want to stop it. Welfare Cash for Weed in Colorado.

TONY SHAFFER: If you're sending SA-11 missiles rather than Stingers to Ukraine, your strategy is shameless. Putin's Grand Ambition.

SLIDESHOW: Hard Reader Reviews.

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

July 22, 2014

Could Chinese-Made Bicycles Be a Factor in Wisconsin's Gubernatorial Race?

In Wisconsin, the governor's race featuring Republican incumbent Scott Walker — perhaps a potential presidential candidate — and Democrat Mary Burke remains pretty close. The Walker campaign thinks they've got an opportunity to damage Burke by pointing out how her family's business shipped jobs to China:

The dispute over Trek Bicycle Corp. flared up last week. The Walker campaign began airing an ad criticizing Trek, the Burke family business, for outsourcing jobs to low-wage China. Trek has not disclosed how much its contract workers there are paid per hour.

If they're not disclosing it, we can surmise it's not much.

For what it's worth, Trek president John Burke — the brother of the candidate — said, "Mary had nothing to do with sourcing decisions at Trek. Those decisions were made by my father and myself." Burke is no longer on the board of the company, but owns stock.

So she's not a direct outsourcer herself; she just profits from the outsourcing decisions of others. Much better!

And back in 2004 — when she was with the company — the U.S. Department of Labor investigated whether employees at Trek qualified for the "Trade Adjustment Assistance Program," a federal entitlement program that assists U.S. workers who have lost or may lose their jobs as a result of foreign trade.

The Department of Labor concluded, "The investigation revealed that production and employment at the subject firm declined from 2002 to 2003. The investigation further revealed an increase in company imports of bicycles during the relevant period." But the Department of Labor concluded the workers did not qualify for one of the forms of assistance because "workers in the workers' firm do possess easily transferable skills."

Burke was at "Netroots Nation," the big progressive blogger conference this weekend. She was asked about "rumors in the media about you and Chinese employees and the minimum wage — is there any truth to that, or any story behind that?"

Here's Burke's answer, in its entirety: "I'd be happy to address that. Trek is the largest manufacturer of bicycles in the United States. Trek employs early 1,000 people in Wisconsin. In addition to $50 million in payroll in Wisconsin, by supporting millions of dollars in goods and services from all other Wisconsin businesses, small businesses across the state, its impact on the Wisconsin economy is incredible. so Trek is very proud to be a great Wisconsin employer, a great contributor to Wisconsin, it was founded nearly 40 years ago right there in Wisconsin, and it has grown to be a global company with its headquarters in Wisconsin."

That is a nice little series of statements and platitudes that doesn't reassure anyone in its lack of specifics. Such as — does the company get parts, supplies, or other materials from China that it could get in the United States? If so, how many? And if so, how much are the workers who produce those parts, supplies and other materials paid? When did the company start getting these supplies from China and were they available from U.S. suppliers, and at what price?

Also note that when Burke brags that the company is "the largest manufacturer of bicycles in the United States," the company wins that distinction by making 10,000 bicycles per year in the U.S . . . out of 1.5 million total. So this company makes a LOT of bikes in Germany and China.

Wisconsin liberals have accused her and her family from prospering from outsourcing:

She also claims in the interview that she never made decisions to ship jobs overseas and that she is opposed to unfair trade deals, both claims which aren't truthful. Burke was a key family member in a family business. In his book, her brother calls her the "brains of the family." Burke can't on the one hand take credit for much of Trek's business success, but then somehow sell the notion that there was a firewall between her and Trek outsourcing thousands of American bike manufacturing jobs.

Plus, Burke is one of Trek's private owners and currently sits on their board. This is a real-time issue. Did she object or do anything to stop Trek for sending jobs to China? Is she doing anything right now to bring back the Trek jobs back?

During her time at Trek, Burke served as a board member on the Bicycle Parts Suppliers Association (BPSA), a powerful trade association that, among other things, has lobbied for weakening tariffs and free trade. In addition, they've defended Chinese manufacturing and fought regulations during the recent Chinese manufacturing lead paint scare.

So, while it is nice to hear Mary Burke bemoan unfair trade deals, the reality is that she in past has fought for them and personally profited from them.

Keep in mind, Mary Burke is running on . . . raising the minimum wage, and also said the minimum wage hike "wouldn't affect" her family's business.

Well, we know it wouldn't affect those Chinese workers.

Of course, we know how this all ends. Every Madison progressive, every union member, every liberal beating the drum for protecting American jobs who sneered about Mitt Romney's greed will shrug their shoulders and vote for her . . . just because she's the Democrat.

Do Any Candidates Really Control Their Public Images?

This morning, Mark Halperin argues Hillary Clinton "lost control of her public image, it's is the worst thing that can happen to someone who's running for president -- it's at a time when she should be in command. She had a book tour, she can control the message. Her operation is playing defense in a lot of stories."

I'm far from a Hillary Clinton defender, but do candidates really "control" their public image? Isn't the image "controlled" -- to the extent it can even be controlled -- partially by the candidate, partially by the staff, and partially by the media?

(Ask Chris Christie if a political figure's staff can shape that figure's image.)

In fact, doesn't Mark Halperin have a lot of say about various political figures' images?

Chappaquiddick: When Progressivism Started Issuing Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Cards

Last Friday was the 45th anniversary of the Chappaquiddick incident. Brian Cates wrote why Chappaquiddick matters -- and why the U.S. public would be wise to study the last half-century — in a lengthy series of Tweets collected on Storify.

I'd just add one more note . . .

Ted Kennedy was one of the biggest, earliest, most glaring examples of how many progressives believed, despite their professed values, the personal wasn't political. You could be the biggest womanizer around, but if you voted to support abortion, the professional women's movement would look the other way on any other behavior.

When Kennedy died, Eleanor Clift wrote about this in an approving, or at least excusing way:

If you are sympathetic to Kennedy and his politics, as I am, you're mindful that the accident at Chappaquiddick happened in 1969, the year after Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. (Ted, just 36 and the last of the brothers, shouldered the burden of 11 more fatherless nieces and nephews.) You're also willing to measure the benefits that Kennedy brought to countless people through his politics, and give them proper weight on the scales of the man's record. Finally, if you measure his capacity to reform himself, you tip the scales further.

Organized women's groups overlooked a lot to stand by the senator from Massachusetts. Feminists who proclaimed "The personal is the political" made an exception for Kennedy. They argued that the political outweighs the personal: if a politician's private life doesn't interfere with his public life, why should it be a problem?

You can see it coming, right? "Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment."

"The personal is political" is a pretty dumb philosophy used to justify a lot of political meddling in our personal lives. A better saying would be "both the personal and the political matter" — that is, how you treat people matters, and it's easy to argue that how you treat others — "Love your neighbor as you love yourself" — is way more important than your philosophy, ideology, or politics. If you're a jerk who agrees with me all the time, I probably don't want to hang around with you or be associated with you.

Sure, a lot of politicians on both sides of the aisle drink too much and womanize. But Ted Kennedy killed somebody, or at the very least, let her die. For almost all of us, serious legal charges would follow that kind of behavior. But Ted Kennedy got a two-month suspended sentence for leaving the scene of an accident. The judge declared Kennedy, "has already been, and will continue to be punished far beyond anything this court can impose." The legal term for that conclusion is horse pucky.

The legal system's determination to avert its eyes from Kennedy's actions is bad enough, but the American political system, as a whole, basically decided to forget that the whole thing ever happened. For everybody outside of a few folks on the right, it's as if deliberate amnesia took hold. A cruel little act of opportunistic murder interferes with all that Camelot glamour, and so Mary Jo Kopechne had to be airbrushed out of history.

Signaling that your personal behavior doesn't really matter as long as you have the right political beliefs is a formula to encourage really dreadful personal behavior. (Progressives might want to contemplate whether some people predisposed to dreadful personal behavior might gravitate to progressive politics specifically because of the broad-based social affirmation and cheap forgiveness it provides. Perhaps some faith communities have to face the same question.)

You can fill in your preferred Bill Clinton anecdote here, and I'll just rattle off some examples of progressives who broke the law and didn't seem to think much of it:

In early 2009, new Treasury secretary Tim Geithner testified before Representative Charlie Rangel's Ways and Means Committee — promising that the Obama administration intended to propose "a series of legislative and enforcement measures to reduce . . . tax evasion and avoidance." Geithner failed to pay about $40,000 in taxes he owed while working for the International Monetary Fund from 2001 to 2004; Rangel was under investigation for tax evasion and failing to report income, for which he was eventually officially censured by Congress. Still, Geithner's unpaid taxes were small potatoes compared with the $128,000 owed by former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, or the $287,273 in back taxes owed by Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri. Or the $2.6 million Al Sharpton owed the IRS.

In the progressive mindset, laws are primarily designed to regulate and manage the actions of other people. Last month in the Daily Beast, columnist Jamelle Bouie (who is now writing for Slate) argued that allegations of illegal secret donations to the election campaign of Washington, D.C., mayor Vincent Gray didn't really matter because he deemed Gray a good enough mayor . . .

Members of the aristocracy are even effectively exempt from gun laws. Recently a District of Columbia judge found a man guilty of "attempted possession of unlawful ammunition" for owning antique replica muzzleloader bullets. The man had no previous criminal charges. A few years ago, the attorney general for D.C. declined to prosecute NBC's David Gregory for breaking the law against possessing a "high-capacity magazine" despite, in the prosecutor's words, "the clarity of the violation of this important law." Gregory held up the magazine during Meet the Press. The attorney general said prosecuting Gregory was not in the interest of public safety; it is unclear why the prosecution of a man in possession of antique replica muzzleloader bullets is in the interest of public safety.

Toss Jose Antonio Vargas onto the pile; he doesn't want to return to his country of legal citizenship, so he feels entitled to falsify official documents, lie on federal forms with penalty of perjury, and drive without a driver's license.

ADDENDA: The NRA launches its 2014 campaign effort with a new ad and web site, "Trigger the Vote". . .

I'm scheduled to appear on Greta Van Susteren's panel tonight.

To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com

Why not forward this to a friend? Encourage them to sign up for NR's great free newsletters here.

Save 75%... Subscribe to National Review magazine today and get 75% off the newsstand price. Click here for the print edition or here for the digital.

National Review also makes a great gift! Click here to send a full-year of NR Digital or here to send the print edition to family, friends, and fellow conservatives.