As US Republicans bash US President Barack Obama and US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi ahead of next month’s US congressional elections, many US Democratic candidates have found a bogeyman of their own: China.
From California to New Hampshire, Democrats are accusing China of draining US jobs and manipulating its currency as they struggle to fend off a Republican surge that is expected to cost them control of the House and possibly the US Senate.
“As long as China is allowed to manipulate its currency, we will continue to shed jobs in Pennsylvania,” Democratic Senate candidate Joe Sestak said in a recent debate in Pennsylvania, one of about 10 contests that could determine control of the Senate. “If we’re going to create jobs here at home, we need to force countries like China to play by the rules.”
The message may be resonating with voters anxious about the economy and an unemployment rate hovering at 9.6 percent.
Sestak has closed the gap in opinion polls with his Republican rival, Pat Toomey, an advocate of free trade, after trailing him by wide margins for the past several months in this manufacturing state.
Toomey “ought to run for Senate in China,” Sestak says in a television ad.
Many US lawmakers have charged that China has engineered its economic rise in part by keeping its currency, the yuan, artificially low against the US dollar. China says its currency should not be a scapegoat for US economic problems.
Terry Madonna, a professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania, said Democrats are looking for a way to pin the recession on Republicans.
“Right now, China is the bogeyman,” he said.
Republicans are expected to gain seats in the Senate after the Nov. 2 midterm elections, but neither party is expected to win the 60 needed to stop the other from blocking legislation with the parliamentary tactic known as filibuster.
Last month the House voted overwhelmingly to impose tariffs on countries like China that keep their currencies artificially low. The Obama administration has not taken a position on the measure, though officials have said that the yuan is significantly undervalued.
In California, Democratic incumbent Senator Barbara Boxer charges Republican Carly Fiorina with directly shipping jobs to China when she headed technology giant Hewlett-Packard.
Voters said they are worried about the loss of US jobs to China and other low-wage economies but wonder whether the US government can do anything to stop it, or whether it even should.
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