Edwards... and Socks

Tonight, Sen. John Edwards speaks in front of the Democratic National Convention in what will be in many ways his introduction to the nation. His oft-repeated stump speech talks in abstractions about his background as "the son of a millworker" and the theme of "the two Americas"; one for the super-rich, one for the rest of the country. I'm guessing he'll stick to these themes tonight, but he would do best to bring them out of abstraction and into the specific issues that the middle class struggles with on a daily basis.

In short, he should talk about socks.

Fort Payne, Alabama is the self-proclaimed sock capital of the world, boasting enough mills to produce over 75% of the world's socks up until a few years ago. That's when China entered the WTO, and their subsidized apparel industry began to compete globally. Clearly, countries that can choose between low-cost Chinese socks and higher-cost socks from Fort Payne, Alabama are going to choose the low-cost option. Fort Payne's market share has dropeed to 40% since 2001. Their workers, who unlike China's demand more than a pittance sum and a bowl of rice to ply their wares, have seen 3,700 jobs lost in the last two years. The sock capital of the world is no longer, gone forever due to unfair competition.

Nowhere in our industrialized society can we see the costs of free trade more than in the textile industry. I say this as the son of a millworker, a man who has worked in textiles since the late 1950s, who has seen virtually every sweater mill in America close down and lay off its employees. 95% of all apparel in America is imported. This outsourcing, unlike other more publicized examples, began in the late 1970s, and has become the consistent policy of the US government, damaging hundreds of thousands of lives who must find other work. By calling on his millworker roots, Edwards can connect this American tragedy to the larger loss of American jobs under this President, the worst job record since Herbert Hoover. As we have seen at this convention with speakers like Barack Obama (who was amazing), personalizing the issues and drawing on one's own experience resonates with the electorate. Edwards has the biography, and the perfect chance to blow the lid off this so-called "recovery," to talk about to shrinking middle class, the invisibility of wage growth, the sadness of lifelong blue-collar workers suddenly forced to compete with their sons for burger-flipping jobs at McDonald's. A country without manufacturing ceases to have leverage in the world. We become dependent rather than reliant; dependent on foreign goods, dependent on foreign capital (from China and Japan, which will be the source of the next great fiscal crisis in our history), dependent on world events. This country of consumers now hungers for clothes from overseas as much as we do oil. And Edwards has the roots and the knowledge to state this fact at the convention, and have it resonate to all workers who struggle to compete with foreign imports. In other words, he shouldn't just SAY he's the son of a millworker; he should talk about the mill.