Three Years Later ...

Today is Labor Day. It is a holiday that has always been significant for me but for different reasons at different stages of my life.

When I was a child, it meant that the summer was over (even if the summer weather was not), and it was time to go back to the classroom. When I was 7 or 8, I grieved for the loss of my freedom.

As I got older, Labor Day became a three–day weekend, an opportunity to relax and take a day off — and, perchance, watch some football.

It took on a whole new meaning for me when I was terminated from my full–time job four years ago — especially after the economic collapse of September 2008, which followed a couple of weeks later.

The next year, in 2009, unemployment was on a steady upward trajectory. A few days before Labor Day, federal figures showed joblessness at 9.7%. Unemployment topped out a few months later at 10.6%.

All that day, I watched my TV, and I listened to my radio, and I waited for the president to say something — anything — to encourage people who had been looking for work throughout the first year of his presidency.

Some, like me, had been looking for work since before he took the oath of office. And I know I needed encouragement.

But it never came.

So I wrote this.

Barack Obama was more interested in stumping for his health care act and then secluding himself to work on the televised address he planned to give to the schoolchildren of America the next day.

I will never forget the feeling of utter abandonment that I felt on that day. I did not vote for Obama in 2008, but I hoped for his success — because I knew that, if he succeeded, I would succeed, too.

There was a lot of fear and anxiety in the land in September 2009.

But Obama cared more about adolescents than out–of–work Americans.

He lost me — permanently — on that occasion. I wouldn't be surprised if he lost a lot more folks that day. Guess we'll find out in nine weeks.

And now, here we are, three years later. And the president wants to make a big show of how concerned he is with the plight of the unemployed.

But what he really wants is our votes so he can keep his job for four more years. That would give him more flexibility — and those inconvenient unemployed and underemployed Americans can be forgotten once again.

Today I watched — with something of a sense of bewilderment — as the president told people at a campaign rally in Ohio that things were better for the unemployed under his leadership.

As if 8.3% unemployment — and it might be higher when the report comes out on Friday, less than 12 hours after Obama delivers his acceptance speech (for which the NFL moved its season opener so as not to cause a conflict) — is something to brag about.

Well, I guess it is — if you have nothing better.

And, apparently, Obama does not.

I guess things have come full circle — because, once again, I find myself grieving my lost freedom.

Talk Is Cheap

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Today is Labor Day, and it is now little more than three days before Barack Obama is slated to give his landmark address on job creation.

He was, as you probably know, going to give his speech on Wednesday — but, as usual, someone in this White House failed to do the most basic of legwork, which would have quickly revealed that a debate between the Republican presidential candidates had been scheduled for that day.

In fact, it has been scheduled for several months, and it is taking place at the library that bears the name of the Republicans' 20th century idol, Ronald Reagan.

It took no special powers of prognostication to anticipate the donnybrook that would follow Obama's hasty and ill–advised announcement of the original scheduling of this speech — or to predict that Obama would be forced to back down.

Yep, a little legwork could have prevented this president from a totally unnecessary and embarrassing scheduling confrontation with congressional Republicans that he was sure to lose.

But it was really no surprise that this administration — in its leap–before–you–look fashion — didn't bother with the details. They would only get in the way of imposing The One's will.

Anyway, when he did lose that one — in what may have been the most predictable result in a lifetime of observing American politics — Obama moved his speech back a single day — putting it in direct competition with the first pro football game of the 2011 season.

It is typical of the ham–handed way this administration operates.

Apparently, now that Obama's presidency is clearly in jeopardy (I have felt that way for a long time, but now, even Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, who was one of the first to climb aboard the Barack Obama Express, before it pulled out of the station, concedes that Obama is "a guy in a really bad spot"), job creation has taken on a new urgency ...

(The fierce urgency of now.)

In fact, I can only presume that, from Barack Obama's vantage point, the unemployment crisis must have emerged from out of the blue, like the attack on Pearl Harbor — because it is usually only that kind of emergency that prompts a president to address a joint session of Congress.

Presidents, of course, speak to joint sessions of Congress when they give their annual State of the Union speeches, but, otherwise, an address to a joint session of Congress typically is given when the nation faces an unexpected emergency — like a Pearl Harbor.

A speech to a joint session of Congress — whether it is by a president or a foreign dignitary or someone else — is not the sort of thing Congress likes to allow very often. It turns the lawmakers' domain into a stage for someone else.

I don't think anyone disagrees that the joblessness crisis is a serious emergency — even the moral equivalent of war — but it has been far from an unexpected emergency, just an ignored one.

Consequently, I do not think there is anything about the current situation that truly warrants a speech before a joint session of Congress. A speech from the Oval Office would be more appropriate, I think — but, for some reason, Obama doesn't like to give speeches there.

The unemployment situation was an emergency 2½ years ago, when monthly job losses were in six digits — but Obama obsessed instead about health care and his first Supreme Court nomination. That was how he chose to spend his political capital — along with spending the first Labor Day of his presidency preparing to address the schoolchildren of America.

Unemployment was 9.5% in September of 2009 — it's 9.1% now.

Why wasn't it a crisis worthy of a speech to a joint session of Congress then instead of now?

Probably because he hadn't been president for a full year in September 2009, and he still enjoyed (to an extent) the traditional honeymoon relationship a new president enjoys. But in September 2011, he is about 14 months from facing an increasingly frustrated electorate — a majority of whom, as Dowd correctly observes, "still like and trust the president," but that isn't what a re–election campaign is about.

Obama was able to win the first time because he has a knack for fancy speechmaking. He promised "hope" and "change," and that sounded good to a lot of people.

But that won't do it this time. No matter how much the voters may like Obama, he will be judged by the results of his presidency. How much change has there been? In Reagan's words, are you better off than you were four years ago?

And job approval surveys suggest that most voters do not believe Obama has delivered because he has been steadily losing ground.

Talk is cheap for incumbents. For an incumbent's words to have any meaning, any value, they must be in harmony with reality, however harsh that reality may be.

It is not necessary for a president to have perfect political pitch, but if he and the voters are in sync, so much the better. To accomplish that, he must enlist the voters as his allies. He must take them into his confidence and explain to them why he believes certain things are necessary.

I have often felt that this president must be tone deaf — because, in virtually every situation he has faced since taking office, he has taken the position that is all but certain to arouse the wrath of the most people or his response has been slow and plodding.

To say this president has been disengaged with joblessness is to severely understate the situation. He has been disengaged on practically all things. The "Obamacare" legislation that stands as the president's signature achievement wasn't even authored by the White House. That responsibility was turned over to congressional Democrats.

But this president isn't just tone deaf. He's dumb and blind, too, the "Tommy" of American presidents.

I don't really have a choice about whether to listen to him on Thursday. I have a news writing/gathering class to teach on Thursday evening, and if my students ask me about the presidential address, I will tell them it is important for working journalists to listen to a presidential address.

But if it is still in progress when I get home — and it probably will not be — I will choose to watch the football game.

As I wrote the other day, I've stopped listening to him — unless it leaks out that he is going to announce something truly bold.

Otherwise, I'll pass. I have no desire to hear another State of the Unionesque laundry list of general (and mostly unrelated) proposals or a rerun of his 2008 stump speech.

Talk is cheap, Mister President. Let's see some action. Real action.

Labor Day

With the unemployment rate nearing 10%, Robert Samuelson of Newsweek probably is guilty of stating the obvious when he says this is "the bleakest Labor Day since at least the early 1980s."

He goes on to say that "cheery news is scarce." To which many long–term unemployed people may be tempted to respond, "Ya think?"

In fact, though, Samuelson observes points that seem to be ignored too often these days. At the very least, they seem to be inconvenient to bring up when the president is trying to have a "teachable moment" over beer with a policeman and a tenured college professor or when Americans are busy fighting with each other over health care reform or the president's intention to address the nation's schoolchildren.

"The implications of prolonged high unemployment — should it materialize — haven't been fully explored," Samuelson writes. (I would argue that "prolonged high unemployment" already has materialized in the lives of many Americans.) "People without work don't acquire on–the–job skills. Young college graduates are already having trouble getting work. High unemployment could depress wage gains for years. It could foster protectionism and long–term poverty."

This is uncharted territory for lots of folks. Robert Gavin writes, in the Boston Globe, that "5 million Americans have been out of work for more than six months, a record number that forecasts a slow, difficult recovery and a long period of high unemployment."

That is the assessment of Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies, Gavin points out, but it is the kind of thing that many people were saying in the months before Barack Obama took office. It makes me wonder — and I'm sure it makes other people wonder — how Obama and Joe Biden could plausibly say that they "misread" the economy or that they were not given all the information they needed.

Everyone else seemed to understand the severity of the situation. Why didn't they?

They seemed to get it. Before the election, Obama sounded like he understood. He promised tax credits to employers who hired Americans in 2009 and 2010, but that promise was forgotten once he was in office.

(Today, on the first Labor Day of his presidency — and only a few days removed from the latest joblessness report that showed the unemployment rate making its way toward 10% — Obama is in Cincinnati — promoting health care reform. He's giving a major address on the subject on Wednesday. When was the last time Obama gave a major address on unemployment and talked about what the administration was doing to promote job creation?)

The Democrats in Congress who hammered out the congressional compromise on the stimulus package in February sounded like they understood the need for job creation. Turned out they were too busy including pork in an attempt to appease their Republican colleagues.

Forgive the unemployed for feeling like an afterthought.

Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis sounds like she gets it. "America's workers ... are resilient, hopeful and optimistic," she writes. "They don't want a hand out, they want to work and provide for their families."

Fine, but if nobody's hiring, it is hard to remain "resilient, hopeful and optimistic." The government has to encourage job creation in these tough times. It's fine for Solis to give displaced workers a pep talk, but what is the government doing to encourage job creation?

Talk is cheap. Paying the rent and feeding and clothing your family are not.

Maybe next Labor Day will be better. But don't count on it.

Learning From History

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"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

George Santayana (1863–1952)
The Life of Reason
Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense

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As I write this, it has been exactly one week since the funeral mass for Ted Kennedy.

During Kennedy's funeral last Saturday, his oldest son, Teddy Jr., gave the speech that was considered by many to be the most moving tribute of all the eulogies that were given in his father's memory.

That assessment probably was based on Teddy Jr.'s recollection of his struggle with bone cancer, which cost him one of his legs, and his personal comments about his relationship with his father. Those words certainly were touching.

Equally significant, though, were his memories of how Kennedy used to take him and his siblings and his cousins to Civil War battlefields. He recalled how his father and historian Shelby Foote would visit battlefields on the anniversaries of the battles in order to gain a greater appreciation for what the soldiers experienced.

"He believed that, in order to know what to do in the future, you had to understand the past," Teddy Jr. told those who were assembled in Boston.

If, before he died, Kennedy didn't impart that lesson directly to his countrymen, I hope they got it last weekend. But, with the endless fighting over health care reform and the latest firestorm over Barack Obama's intention to speak to America's schoolchildren next week, I have my doubts.

Obama fancies himself a student of history, but he often seems to lack an awareness of the lessons of history.

Well, if the president needs a little help in that regard, Matthew Rothschild can give him some historical perspective with an article he has written for The Progressive.

"It's Labor Day and the American worker doesn't have a lot to celebrate," Rothschild writes. "Unemployment stands at 9.7 percent — that's 15 million people out of work, officially, and millions more unofficially."

Rothschild goes on to observe that "the richest Americans have seen their wealth skyrocket, so much so that now we have widest gap between the rich and the poor since 1929."

Ah, yes, 1929. There are many years that would have little meaning for non–historians, even though those years brought significant developments, but it seems to me that just about anyone who ever studied American history, especially 20th century American history, would be able to tell you that 1929 was the year of the Stock Market Crash that helped to usher in the Great Depression.

Well, the prevailing belief is that the Depression began with the Stock Market Crash — but, in truth, real estate values had been declining for awhile, and the long–term influence of the crash was not clear to many Americans when it happened. Neither of my parents had been born when the stock market crashed, but my studies of that period indicate that reality didn't settle in until later on, when banks began to fail and an economic domino effect was under way.

But some people understood immediately what the crash meant. There are many stories of folks who did not wish to face what was to come and chose to end it all. Some put bullets through their heads. Others hanged themselves or jumped from tall buildings.

There are some differences between the current recession and 1929. Today, most people believe this will not turn into another Depression. They disagree over whether the actions of the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress are responsible, but most believe an economic catastrophe like the one in the 1930s has been avoided.

And, while historians disagree over exactly when the Depression really began, economists tend to agree that this recession began in December 2007, but things didn't get noticeably bad for most until the economic meltdown late last year.

People were losing their jobs before then, of course, just as there were signs before the Stock Market Crash that the economy was dangerously unstable. And, in the year since the meltdown, the economy has been losing hundreds of thousands of jobs each month. Some of the folks who lost their jobs before the meltdown may well have found new employment, but it isn't much of a reach to say that most of the people who were unemployed last Labor Day are still unemployed.

Consequently, this is the second straight Labor Day that many people have been out of work. The Calculated Risk blog provides ample data showing that long–term unemployment is higher than it has been since the Depression.

And economist/columnist Paul Krugman observes in his New York Times blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, that long–term unemployment is "the most destructive in human terms."

How will the destructive nature of unemployment in the early 21st century differ from the 20th century? Well, I suppose the answer to that really lies in the demographic breakdown of the out–of–work labor force. And, when I say "demographic," that isn't a reference to gender or race or anything like that. It has more to do with the fact that technological advancements not only change the way we all live but also have the power to make certain job functions obsolete.

Certainly, the nature of the economy is changing, No industry of which I am aware has been immune to the poor economy, and a key to each industry's recovery will be which jobs have been permanently lost and what that means in human terms.

That's why I have been saying all along that Obama and the Democrats needed to focus their efforts on job creation. They haven't. They have permitted 7½ months to go by, and unemployment is teetering on double–digit territory.

It may not be too late to encourage job creation, although time has run out for some of the unemployed. But, while they still have huge majorities in Congress and occupy the White House, Democrats must act and act quickly. Unfortunately, they chose now to wage this fight on health care reform. After enacting a pork–laden stimulus package, this isn't the best time to be pushing for tax incentives to encourage employers to hire people — as any student of history would be sure to tell you, the last thing you want to do is wage a two–front war. Ted Kennedy was devoted to the cause of health care reform, but he knew enough about history to know that you must pick the right time to wage certain battles.

Health care is important, but first you've gotta eat and you've got to have a roof over your head and you've got to have clothes to wear.

"Obama and the Democrats have a chance to improve the lives of working people," Rothschild writes. "But if they cave on the necessary policy changes, next Labor Day may be even grimmer than this one."

Well, for those who decide to stick around.