While Senator Kerry runs as a citizen of the United Nations, Senators Schumer and Clinton are running with the far right as American nationalist-protectionists. They reacted yesterday to a sensible paragraph that was released this week in the president’s annual economic report.

The paragraph said: “One facet of increased services trade is the increased use of offshore outsourcing in which a company locates labor-intensive service industry functions to another country. For example, a U.S. firm might use a call-center in India to handle customer service-related questions. The principal novelty of outsourcing services is the means by which foreign purchases are delivered. Whereas imported goods might arrive by ship, outsourced services are often delivered using telephone lines or the Internet. The basic economic forces behind the transactions are the same, however. When a good or service is produced more cheaply abroad, it makes more sense to import it than to make or provide it domestically.”

It makes perfect sense to us. But the senators interpreted it as an insult.

“The president always said he had a jobs program. It’s just too bad it’s for jobs overseas,” Mr. Schumer said yesterday. “The president needs to personally repudiate this position immediately and show a little more sensitivity to helping the millions of American workers who have seen their jobs go abroad. To do anything less is tantamount to giving all those companies who are moving jobs out of the U.S. a wink and a nod telling them ‘keep it up, boys.'”

Mr. Schumer sounds an awful lot like the right-wing former presidential candidate Gary Bauer, who in an e-mail yesterday wrote, “one economist’s ‘gain’ is one U.S. worker’s lost job! I’m all for free markets, but this cavalier attitude toward middle class American families is unacceptable. How likely is it that the $45,000-a-year IBM service-sector employee, who voted for Bush in 2000, will vote for him again if he lost his job to a worker in China willing to do the same task for $3,000? Not very likely if he reads in his local paper today that a White House economist calls his job loss ‘a good thing.’…I know President Bush cares about displaced workers and I believe his economic policies are far better than anything the Democrats have to offer. But he isn’t being served well when a report with this kind of rhetoric is issued by the administration.”

What must the Chinese and Indians think about the American far left and far right conspiring to prevent them from getting jobs? Here the Democrats have been complaining about America alienating the world, and Mr. Schumer and Mrs. Clinton seem determined to prevent growth in the service-sector of developing nations in the global economy. How are American companies supposed to find customers for their goods and products overseas if the Democrats and Gary Bauer want to keep all the high-paying jobs in America? How is the American economy going to provide jobs at home if companies can’t maximize profits. It seems an awfully zero-sum, and contradictory, view of the world.