Artur Davis: Is Pete Hoekstra’s Ad Racist?

Hoekstra needs to spend three minutes watching the Clint Eastwood Super Bowl ad. It captures, much more powerfully and far more honestly, the real Chinese challenge.

The long-term China threat is not that they finance our debt – we should blame our lack of fiscal discipline and our aversion toward hard choices on spending for that–but the fact that we’re losing ground to a country that is poorer and much less equitable than we are. They are still out performing us and out strategizing us in the fields of advanced manufacturing and engineering, and their top-heavy, command and control economy is proving more supple than our own capital markets. That ought to be a gut-check that Democrats and Republicans should run ads about.

And the young woman in the spot? She’s actually our ally, because she represents a rising generation of Chinese who are bound to push their country toward a more decentralized, less predatory approach to human capital. That transition will make them a fairer competitor of ours, and will redefine the decades long race to the bottom that has cost us so many manufacturing jobs.

(Cross-posted, with permission of the author, from Politico’s Arena)