Governor says Indiana should think globally
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Factory work dwindled as companies moved operations overseas. Indiana, a manufacturing powerhouse where you once could get a good-paying job even without a high school education, was falling behind.
Yet when Subaru started building a plant here, it wasn’t celebrated as a coup for the Republican candidate for governor. Instead, a Democratic challenger was swept into office after running attack ads highlighting that the automaker was Japanese.
In a state where resistance to change is often touted as a virtue, historians say the xenophobic-tinged opposition to the Subaru factory was no exception.
Now, nearly 30 years later, Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb says Indiana’s prosperity relies on rethinking that approach.
“Isolation, digging a moat around yourself, filling it and saying, ‘We’re good,’ would be retreat from not just competing, but having the opportunity to win.” Holcomb said.
“There’s a lot of good about ‘the good old days,’ but there’s a bigger windshield than rearview mirror,” he later added.
In recent months, Holcomb helped persuade India-based outsourcing firm Infosys to establish offices in Indianapolis, bringing a projected 2,000 jobs; got skeptical Republicans in the Statehouse to fund a direct flight between Indianapolis and Paris with hopes of luring European business; and signed an agreement to deepen economic ties with Japan.
On Friday, he will be leading a trade mission to India, his third such trip since taking office in January.
It’s not yet clear whether Holcomb’s efforts will amount to more than baby steps — or if change-averse Indiana is willing to go along.
If history is any guide, Holcomb is likely to face resistance. His vision of Indiana outcompeting larger commerce centers on the world stage also comes when nostalgia for the past and hostility to foreign trade are powerful political currents that helped elect President Donald Trump.
“Change in Indiana has always been evolutionary — moderate, slow, sometimes very slow,” said James H. Madison, an emeritus history professor at Indiana University who wrote the state’s definitive history, “Hoosiers.” ‘’When someone does try to move outside of the comfort zone, often they are slapped back down.”
Around the turn of the 20th century, those who embraced scientific agricultural advances in the agrarian state were often ridiculed as “book farmers.” In the 1920s, anxieties about immigrants and the loose morals of the Jazz Age fanned a surge in Ku Klux Klan membership, including among government officials.
Then there was former Lt. Gov. John Mutz’s race against Evan Bayh in 1988, in which Bayh attacked Mutz for his support of tax incentives that went to Subaru.