President Obama claims to support America's exporting and so-called "green jobs" industries, but he also likes rules that restrict the importation of critical inputs to those industries. Antidumping rules are supposed to protect American manufacturers and, by extension, American jobs. But it doesn't work out that way.

Rhetorically, President Obama is a champion of industry—as long as it’s green. To put our money where his mouth is, the president has already devoted over $100 billion in direct subsidies and tax credits to promote investment in solar panel, wind harnessing, lithium ion battery, and other industries he deems crucial to “winning the future.” (See Economic Report of the President, 2011, P. 129, Box 6-2 “Clean Energy Investments in the Recovery Act” for a list of some of those subsidies.) Concerning those industries, the president said in his 2010 SOTU address:

Countries like China are moving even faster… I’m not going to settle for a situation where the United States comes in second place or third place or fourth place in what will be the most important economic engine of the future.

To be sure, I am opposed to industrial policy, which presumes that one person or a cabal of self-anointed soothsayers knows how the future will unfold. But the story I am about to share is, I think, instructive in describing endemic policy dissonance within this administration and speaks to what even the president’s staunchest supporters describe as half-heartedness and an incapacity or unwillingness to follow through. Some chalk it up to indifference, but it’s really an aversion to making choices that could offend potential supporters.