UK exit vote serves as “cautionary tale” for White House race

Trying to tamp down roiling financial markets and fears of a crumbling European Union, President Obama said Friday that Great Britain’s vote to leave the EU “speaks to the ongoing challenges raised by globalization,” but that the United States’ “special relationship” with London will not change.

Obama, who was attending the Global Entrepreneurship Summit of entrepreneurs from 170 countries at Stanford University, told an audience of 1,700 that he had spoken with British Prime Minister David Cameron.

While the United Kingdom will no longer be part of the European Union, “one thing that will not change is the special relationship that exists between the two nations,” the president said.

[...] analysts cautioned that the unexpected outcome of the British vote was a “cautionary tale” that could ripple across the Atlantic and inform the race for the White House.

There are parallels in how middle-class people in both countries have seen their wages stagnate while the elite have seen their wealth soar over the past two decades.

“We saw it even before this election in the Tea Party movement and in the Occupy movement” in the U.S., said Andrew Busch, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College.

Presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders have tapped into those passions about how “the political establishment is not responsive to their concerns,” Soine said.

Britain’s vote should strike a note of caution for people who don’t want Donald Trump to be president.

Often, she said, the only thing people hear about globalization is how jobs were moved overseas or how more money needs to be spent on security to combat terrorism.

Trump seized on such concerns Friday and drew another stark contrast between him and likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in both temperament and policy.

Oddly, when he arrived in Scotland, Trump tweeted that people were “going wild over the vote,” even though Scotland voted overwhelmingly against leaving the European alliance.

Trump appeared to shrug off the global financial reverberations caused by the exit vote.

Clinton’s campaign, meanwhile, offered a measured statement similar in tone and wording to Obama’s.

“Our first task has to be to make sure that the economic uncertainty created by these events does not hurt working families here in America,” Clinton said.

Obama touched on that aspect during a live-streamed interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg after they participated in a panel at the Stanford summit.