BURLINGTON,
Vt., Jan. 19 – As Chinese President Hu Jintao arrived in Washington, D.C., for
a state visit, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) questioned why the Smithsonian’s
National Museum of American History gift shop sells busts of American
presidents that are made in China.

Sanders called
the symbolism both “extraordinary” and “pretty pathetic.”

“It appears
that a museum owned by the people of the United States, celebrating the history
of the United States, cannot find companies in this country employing American
workers that are able to manufacture statues of our founding fathers, or our
current president,” Sanders wrote in a letter to Brent D.
Glass, the history museum director.

The museum
sells bronze-colored, made-in-China busts of U.S. presidents from George
Washington to Barack Obama.

“Given the
state of the American economy, I would urge the National Museum of American
History to do its very best to find American companies to manufacture the
products that it sells,” Sanders said.

He called
himself a fan of the world-class Smithsonian museums and singled out for praise
the National Museum of American History, saying it “does a great job.” But the
senator said the history museum and others could set a better example if the
gift shops stocked more merchandise made in America.

“As a nation,
we have all got to be aware that one of the major reasons that the unemployment
rate in this country is so high is because it is increasingly difficult to find
products

in our nation’s stores that are manufactured in this country.
Our national museum should do its best to be a model in helping us address that
crisis situation,” the senator wrote.

Some 42,000
U.S. factories shut down since 2001, and more than 5.4 million good-paying
manufacturing jobs were lost in this country,

Sanders noted. “In fact, today,
the United States currently has fewer manufacturing jobs than it did in April
of 1941, about eight months before the attack on Pearl Harbor.  This
clearly is one of the factors contributing to the substantial shrinking of the
middle class that we have been seeing in the last several decades,” Sanders
said in the letter.