Carson’s district is the fifth-poorest in the country. Only 10 percent of his constituents have a college degree, and their alma maters are mostly schools the Northeastern elites have never heard of. There have been five Wrangler plant closures in the state, including two in his district and 121 mass layoffs (those of 50 people or more) statewide in the past year.
While he remains a free-trader, Carson is beginning to question some of the basic tenets of trade, that it is an economic good and that the social disruption it causes is temporary. He thinks the policymakers in Washington are insulated from the pain that lower-wage workers experience as they are dumped out of the economy.
Carson is a New Democrat, a wing of the party that pushed free trade during the Clinton administration and touts a pro-growth business agenda. “New Democrats glibly say education is the answer, but no one is making the investment-and that’s assuming education even works,” he says. “My constituents are worried they have no future in the work force.”
Carson quotes the African-American sociologist, William Julius Wilson, who studied the decline of blue-collar jobs in America and the devastating impact on the black family. “When jobs disappear, you see a whole social fabric fray,” says Carson. His district is rural and poor and 70 percent white. One in four people report their racial makeup as Native American. There are few African-Americans, but the phenomenon is identical to what Wilson observed, says Carson. He says such social ills as a high rate of teenage pregnancy and a growing drug problem with amphetamines can be traced in part to the absence of meaningful work.
Trade is a factor, he says, along with immigration, but the biggest trend causing the rapid exodus of work is technology. Workers in Oklahoma and in much of the country– aside from the urban centers–have no idea how to keep up with the accelerating pace of technology, and the policymakers in Washington aren’t much help. “High paying, meaningful work is the province of fewer and fewer people,” Carson concludes. Other than tax-cuts to help generate jobs, Bush doesn’t have much of a plan. And while John Kerry isn’t the free trader he was a year ago, he hasn’t yet fleshed out a message than can reach the rising number of Americans who are uneasy about their place in the work force.
Carson, 37, is a young man in a hurry to make a difference. He was elected to Congress in 2000, and earlier this year announced he was running for the Senate seat vacated by Republican Don Nickles. A sixth-generation Oklahoman, Carson is the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. His mother’s family arrived in the state on the “Trail of Tears,” the forced march that was part of the federal government’s Indian removal policy. Now, 166 years later, the blond-haired, blue-eyed Carson is only one-eighth Cherokee Indian, but he is a proud member of the Cherokee nation. His father was a career employee of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and he grew up living on a series of Navajo reservations.
Democrats tout Carson’s candidacy as an example of the party’s diversity, packaging him in a “Dream Team” of Senate candidates with Illinois state senator Barack Obama, who is African-American, and Colorado Attorney General Ken Salazar, who is Hispanic. If Carson wins his bid for the Senate, he would succeed the retiring Colorado Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell as the only Native American in Congress. Carson’s minimal opposition in the Democratic primary, and a messy brawl on the Republican side combine to give him an edge.
Three Republicans are vying for their party’s nod. Two are free-traders; one is a Pat Buchanan-style protectionist. Whichever one prevails, Carson will continue to question the dogma of the day on trade. He is a philosopher by nature and training with a degree in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar. “Are these changes in our economic interest and we should just make peace with them? Or is there a way we can shape the economy in a way that there is not this tremendous divergence between the elites who benefit and the people who get hurt?”
Voters are looking for leaders to guide them through this transformation in the economy. According to the polls, one-quarter of Americans favor free trade; another quarter opposes it; and half the electorate is up for grabs. They don’t know what to think, which means there is opportunity for the politician who can speak to people’s hopes as well as respond to their fears with realistic measures. As a New Democrat who favors limited government, Carson understands that achieving the right balance could mean reclaiming the loyalty of lunch-pail America.
