Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman who represents California’s Silicon Valley, is an unlikely champion of rural America and the Rust Belt, but he believes he has hit on a theme that resonates: bring back manufacturing to Iowa, Ohio and West Virginia.
Khanna was driving last week from Des Moines to Waterloo on his long campaign to revive forgotten places by making computer chips in Columbus, Ohio, and teaching computer coding to Iowa Central Community College students in Jefferson.
He calls it “economic patriotism,” and it certainly sounds like the platform for a presidential campaign.
“You have to start with the recognition that for the last 50 years working people have gotten screwed,” said Khanna, who has been knee-deep in Appalachia and the Midwest for years preaching about redirecting capital flows from China and the two coasts to Iowa, Missouri, Kansas and Kentucky.
That’s a half century of off-shoring jobs and prospects that has places like Youngstown, Ohio, and Ottumwa, Iowa, reeling from the blows: hollowing out industry in search of cheaper foreign labor, not investing in basic infrastructure (roads, bridges, broadband and community colleges), and handing over entire industries to China.
“For all that time this nation was asleep. Our attitude was, ‘We’ll just win the Nobel Prize’ and let everybody else profit off it,” Khanna said in an interview. “We need to stitch it back together.”
Your car is sitting in the garage six weeks because the dealer can’t get a chip made in locked-down China. John Deere tractor cabs and Ford e-vehicles are made south of the border. Meanwhile, Motor City atrophies. The union got busted. The little town school shut down.
It leaves people frustrated.
Khanna gets it. Then, why do Democrats lose in these very places?
Well, the Democratic Party just told Iowa and its caucuses to get lost. Second, did things get that much better when Democrats controlled things?
Voters responded to Donald Trump because he confronted the swamp that drained out the Mississippi River towns. Except, rather than convincing Intel to invest in Waterloo or South Bend they just got a tax break that won’t stop anyone from expanding in Indonesia.
“We need to be a manufacturing superpower,” Khanna says.
Rep. Tim Ryan talked that way but it wasn’t good enough to win over JD Vance in the Ohio Senate race. John Delaney talked about capital flight from the Midwest and got 25th out of 25 presidential candidates in Iowa.
Khanna says he isn’t talking just about trying to redirect venture capital, but taking a New Deal, all-in approach to making American technology and manufacturing unrivaled in the world.
“I think that has resonance with voters,” Khanna said.
The question is if anyone is hearing him.
Khanna, the son of immigrants to Pennsylvania, is one of the few Democratic leaders who is trying to understand the areas that are turning deep red. He notes that Obama won Iowa twice. What happened? Things just got worse in Keokuk, not better. May I offer you some commercial real estate in Clinton. Iowa?
Khanna thinks it is a “total mistake for the party to write off Iowa. It’s frustrating.”
He has invested years here, helping to launch a program in Jefferson that trains students in computer coding to hook them up with remote jobs in Silicon Valley. Khanna insists that people should not have to move away from their hometown just to get a decent job.
You would think he is running for president, except it appears that the Iowa Caucuses won’t be first anymore. Still, he is driving the snow-dusted roads when no one else is preaching economic patriotism. He is searching for a way for his message to break through — that with a strategy and the money to back it up, we can make chips and cars and solar panels here. This half-century of disinvestment and consolidation has left much of the country without a purpose. That’s when democracy and freedom fade.
“You have to get to the voters,” he said.
That sounds like a presidential campaign for 2028.
Art Cullen is editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017 and is author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” Email times@stormlake.com.
From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2023
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