“Who is the unilateralist candidate for president this year, the man who’s willing to push our allies away and who questions the patriotism of those who disagree with him? That would be John Kerry, at least on the issue of trade,” argue Cesar Conda and Stuart Anderson in the March 29 issue of The Weekly Standard:

Kerry may like to portray himself as a multilateralist, whom foreign leaders are secretly rooting for. But when it comes to trade policy and the outsourcing debate, he claims that it’s America versus the world.

The recent flap over outsourcing — the buzzword for American companies’ hiring professional workers abroad — is almost purely political. Reliable data show that America is not “losing” jobs to foreign workers. “Despite the political outcry over the outsourcing of white-collar jobs to such places as India and Ghana, the latest U.S. government data suggest that foreigners outsource far more office work to the U.S. than American companies send abroad,” reports the Wall Street Journal. Indeed, according to the Commerce Department, the value of “legal work, computer programming, telecommunications, banking, engineering, management consulting and other private services” performed by U.S. workers for foreign clients rose about 7 percent in 2003. In other words, “outsourcing” is a net creator of jobs for Americans, not to mention its benefits for the overall health of the economy.”

That’s right: so-called “outsourcing” is not only good for foreign workers, but it’s good for American workers, too — protestations from the Pat Buchanan left notwithstanding. Protectionism, on the other hand, is a big step backward, and one that Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan warned a House committee “would make matters worse rather than better. They would do little to create jobs, and if foreigners were to retaliate we would surely lose jobs.”

So, will John Kerry continue flogging this lame horse? You betcha. Does he know better? Of course he does. But Kerry also knows that — on a first-glance, superficial level — the protectionism he (and Pat Buchanan, let’s not forget) espouses looks good to many underinformed American voters. And for Kerry, it is much better to look good than to feel good — at least where governing is involved.

Which, I suppose, explains the Botox.

[update: more, from Sebastian Mallaby, WaPo]

—–