Political Quotes

“Well, I thought it was interesting that when the Senator from Ohio and I worked hard on putting together the Economic Recovery Act to try to put a net under this economy and stop it from collapsing--and we were probably close to having a complete collapse. Despite the folks who come to the Senate floor who say no jobs were created, the CBO says 3 million jobs were created or saved. But when we put that together, Senator Brown from Ohio and I and others wrote something called a ``Buy American'' provision, and people nearly had apoplectic seizures here. They were doing cartwheels in the Chamber, so upset and concerned and nervous about what this would do, if with our money, in order to employ our people, we decided to buy our products. How selfish is that, they would say. It was exactly the right thing to do. Why would we try to stimulate economic recovery in America by buying goods from China or Japan? So what we tried to do is to say that there should be a preference with these funds to buy American. But even that was unbelievably controversial. We got it done, and I am pleased we did. While the Senator is here, I wanted to make the point that the Huffy bicycle story is almost the perfect storm of everything that is wrong. These are workers in Ohio who made $11 an hour plus benefits and then they all got fired. I have described about their leaving their empty shoes in the parking lot on the last day of work and so on. But the Huffy bicycle was sent to China.…”