Obama and South Asians

The great Mike Allen, my former colleague at Time and now of The Politico, has an interesting item in his must reads this morning. As I mentioned last week, the Obama campaign sent out a memo attacking Hillary Clinton for too close ties to companies that send jobs to India and went so far as to label her, D-Punjab. This seemed nutty to me, not only for its potential to offend more than a billion South Asians but also because they whacked such widely held stocks as Cisco. Today, Mike Allen points his readers to the South Asians for Obama website where they are none too thrilled about the whole event. (Just for the record, i note that my wife works for Hillary Clinton.)

Look, there's a legitimate debate to have in this campaign about sending jobs overseas and how we, as a country, should deal with globalization. And the Obama campaign or anyone else shouldn't be shy about bringing up those issues. But there are ways to do it without offending and by being more honest about how we're all implicated in the export of American jobs.. Since so much of the American economy is now potentially vulnerable t the charge of being involved in shipping jobs overseas, you have a situation where the Clintons feel that they have to divest themselves of Wal-Mart stock and put all their money in cash and the Obama campaign takes whacks at Cisco--whose ads about connecting the world, ironically, seem to jibe with Obama's own multicultural message and history. I'd love for a candidate to say: "I drive a foreign car and I shop at Wal-Mart and I own stocks in companies that ship jobs overseas because it's cheaper--just like a lot of you. And like a lot of you I feel uneasy about it. We need policies that will encourage American jobs and American companies to spend more here so I propose....."