DOMESTIC MANUFACTURERS TO OBAMA:  GREGG EXIT CREATES FINAL OPPORTUNITY TO ADD DOMESTIC MANUFACTURER TO CABINET, EXPANDING BEYOND CURRENT “TEAM OF OUTSOURCERS”

USBIC’s Kearns: “Rather than being embarrassed by the Gregg departure, the president should welcome a great and final opportunity to add to his senior economic staff a genuine domestic manufacturer – that is a leader who can foster U.S. economic growth by creating new factories and good-paying jobs here at home – not another orthodox free trade outsourcer.”

WASHINGTON, Feb. 13 – The 1,850-member U.S. Business and Industry Council today called Senator Judd Gregg’s withdrawal as President Obama’s Commerce Secretary pick an exciting chance for the administration to add a domestic manufacturer to the outsourcer-dominated inner circle of economic advisors he has assembled.

Said Council President Kevin L. Kearns, “Despite his campaign opposition to trade policies that send U.S. jobs and production overseas rather than goods – and his promises to seek diverse opinions, President Obama’s economic advisors generally add up to a “Team of Outsourcers.”  Senator Gregg’s withdrawal gives the President a terrific new opportunity to keep his promises and to break his discouraging pattern of Washington insider/orthodox economic thinker appointments.”

Kearns continued, “Rather than being embarrassed by the Gregg departure, the president should welcome a great and final opportunity to add to his senior economic staff a genuinely domestic manufacturer – that is a leader who can foster U.S. economic growth by creating new factories and good-paying jobs here at home – not another orthodox free-trade outsourcer.”

Added Kearns, “The American people and the companies that work so hard to strengthen the domestic economy and create middle-class jobs for American workers deserve no less.  And a president who claims to recognize the virtue of diverse sources of advice urgently needs a Commerce Secretary who’s a true economic patriot and can think outside the box of the prevailing economic ‘wisdom’ in Washington.”

According to Kearns, the Gregg withdrawal also enables the president to add a representative of the economy’s productive sector to his cabinet, someone sorely now missing.  

“Wall Street has plenty of representatives on the Obama team,” Kearns observed.  “But the entrepreneurs that actually create the wealth American finance depends on are absent.  For an economy and president that need to overcome today’s crisis by encouraging more production at home, that’s a major oversight, which should be rectified by the new Commerce Secretary appointment.”

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