Looking Out for Number One

---

"Honesty is the best policy — when there is money in it."

Mark Twain

---

I'll be the first one to tell you that I was never very strong in certain subjects in school.

I knew a few people who got terrific grades in just about everything — there was one in particular who made it look stupefyingly easy, but she was such a sweet person that no one held it against her when she messed up the curve for the rest of us — but I'm sure they would tell you there were subjects at which they had to really work to keep that grade–point average up.

There may be some people in this world who do have a natural aptitude for just about every scholastic subject, but I have yet to meet one — just people who have successfully cultivated the appearance of brilliance.

And that is probably almost as good as if they really are brilliant. What people believe to be true tends to trump whatever is true.

That's what makes the art of spin so important in the world of politics. Even if they don't know much else, politicians do know a lot about the image–reality dynamic. When it is working in their favor, they ride the wave. But when the tide goes against them, they need the professional spinmeisters to turn things around.

In my experience, most politicians weren't the brightest bulbs in the box when they were in school. In fact, many might have been the polar opposite of that girl I mentioned earlier.

But the successful ones always seem to have known when it was time to trust their futures to the professional spinmeisters — who could, as I used to hear the adults in my world say from time to time, make chicken salad out of chicken s**t. In some circles — and depending upon what was being said — I guess that was/is called bluffing.

Sometimes, though, even spin won't work. That's when the strategy seems to be simply to change the subject.

And this year, with the party primaries in the midterm election campaigns now in full swing, a news event seems to have been made to order for changing the subject — the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. It is a story that has been going on for nearly a month, much of it spent watching search parties fly over the Indian Ocean.

As I write this, the searchers apparently are no closer to learning the flight's fate than they have been in the last four weeks — but they continue to chase every lead, no matter how unlikely it may be. And news networks are lampooned for labeling a 4–week–old story breaking news.

But for politicians, particularly Democrats and most especially those in federal office, it means attention is taken away from the facts about Obamacare and the economy. For them, that is almost certainly a good thing.

Now, economics was one of those subjects I took in college because I was required to do so, not because I had any special understanding of the material. It was like a foreign language to me, and I never had much success learning a second language, either.

I have friends who were and still are fluent in economics. I have always freely admitted that I am not. I sure did try to be when I was in that class. I spent hours reading and re–reading the chapters of my ECON textbooks, hoping some of it would stick, but I regret to report that little, if any, of it did.

(Well, as Will Rogers used to say, we're all ignorant. We're just ignorant about different things.)

And today, most of my understanding of economics is based on my understanding of logic. That normally helps me in unfamiliar territory — but economics really is another matter. It has a logic all its own.

I don't understand the whimsical nature of the stock market or the prices of gold and silver — or, to be honest, monetary policy in general.

But I do have a basic understanding of natural law. See, I took physics in high school. I didn't do very well at it, but I understood enough about motion and similar principles from my own observations of the world that I wasn't completely lost in that class.

I knew that every action has an equal and opposite reaction — from something as simple as playing baseball. To hit a ball a great distance, it was necessary to swing with as much force as possible. You don't hit the ball out of the park by squaring up to bunt.

And I knew from basic math that if you have a certain quantity of something and you give up a portion of it — through commerce or consumption or whatever — you are left with less to consume or trade for other things.

It isn't rocket science. And, for me, that is definitely a good thing.

Back when Barack Obama ran for president the first time, I freely acknowledge seeing logic in some of his objectives, but the recession and the economic implosion left what I thought was an unavoidable conclusion. The jobs crisis had to be met first — before any of the other objectives could be met.

Yes, I said, the health care system needs to be reformed. But not trashed — and certainly not while this nation is on its economic knees. Put America back to work so there is a solid economic foundation upon which to rebuild health care.

If we didn't do that, I warned, we would see premiums and deductibles go up, policies canceled, existing full–time jobs downgraded to part–time ones, and existing part–time jobs eliminated.

Yes, I said, the minimum wage should be higher. But we shouldn't forget that it was really only intended as a minimum entry–level wage. Over time, as the individual gains experience and knowledge, that individual will receive raises, bonuses, all sorts of additional incentives.

And I was also uncomfortable with the idea of raising the minimum wage by nearly 40%. It was unrealistic to think that businesses could give their current workers that kind of raise and be able to increase their workers' hours, much less create new jobs.

The economy is not one big faceless entity in spite of what we hear about a handful of massive corporations that monopolize everything. Yes, there are huge corporations that do control an ever–growing segment of the U.S. economy, but much of America's economic activity is still in the hands of small business owners. There may not be as many mom–and–pop shops as there once were, but they still drive the American economy.

Except for the newcomers, I guess nearly all small business owners have been in business for awhile. They're bound to have a pretty good idea what kind of annual profits they can expect from their businesses, and they budget accordingly. When their incomes don't meet their needs because of added financial demands, they have to make adjustments. Maybe minor adjustments in the prices being charged or the products/services being offered will bring things back into balance. Sometimes they have to cut employee hours. They may have to cut some jobs.

If you own your business and the math isn't balancing, you look for ways to make it balance. If you are required to meet new guidelines that take money from your budget, you have to compensate for that. If you are required to pay your employees more, you have to compensate for that as well.

You do what you have to do. Same in your personal life. If you are spending more than you're taking in, you have to find ways to economize. You have to function within your means.

It's physics. It's the law of survival — looking out for number one. And you can't blame anyone for that, can you?

If someone tries to sell me on the idea, the image that America can do things that I know in my heart are at odds with natural law, I resist. Because reality tells me otherwise, and I have to ask:

Why should the United States be immune to natural law?

That is the great unasked question in America today. But I get the feeling that more and more Americans are asking it in their hearts and minds.

The latest Associated Press-GfK poll indicates more movement away from the Democrats. That is bad news in the midterm election year.

I believe it is due, in part, to the fact that more people are realizing that, without a sound foundation, no lasting achievements are possible.

You Can't Spin This

---

---

I've seen this countless times before — and, as Weird Al Yankovic put it in his parody of MC Hammer's hip hop song, I can't watch this. I feel as if I have seen this before, and I don't want to watch this again.

But I don't really have a choice.

The monthly jobless report was released today, and, in the wake of recent economic reports, it came as no surprise to learn that unemployment went up to 8.2% in May. It was, however, a bit of a surprise that only 69,000 jobs were added to the economy in May — and, considering the fact that job gains in recent months were revised downward, it may well be that, when the dust finally settles, there may be no net job gains in May — there may even be net job losses.

Sixty–nine thousand jobs doesn't even cover average monthly population gains — let alone make a dent in the number of long–term unemployed.

Barack Obama's re–election campaign has been banking on continued evidence of an economic recovery — even the 0.1% gains that have been witnessed in some recent months would be preferable to the loss that was reported today. Economic experts have been saying for several weeks that they think the jobs situation will deteriorate this summer.

In other words, the worst is yet to come.

If a gain of any kind had been registered in May, it might still have been possible (if the economy managed to lower the unemployment rate by 0.2% per month) for the rate to be as low for Obama this November as it was when the voters re–elected Ronald Reagan in 1984.

And that is what the Obama campaign craves — an opportunity to run for a second term with a jobless rate equal to the one that existed for the Gipper.

Ain't gonna happen.

The first half of Reagan's first term resembled Obama's, with unemployment rates in double–digit territory. But the economy began to recover in 1983, and Reagan was re–elected, even though the unemployment rate was higher than it had been for any incumbent seeking a second term since the days of FDR.

However, the recovery of 1984 was more sustained, far more robust than this one, which has gone in fits and starts, like all the other "recoveries" since we were told the recession ended three years ago. Where Reagan sprinted to the finish line under the "Morning in America" banner, Obama is limping in that direction.

And jobs reports like the one that came out today are pressing the president into the "stay the course" mode that Reagan followed in the 1982 midterm elections — and resulted in the loss of 26 House seats for Reagan's Republicans — which doesn't have the inspirational quality of hope and change.

"Obama sees the glass as half full, arguing the economy is slowly improving and asking voters to trust him to help nurture a full recovery," writes Tom Raum of the Associated Press.

"No president since Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression has won re–election with an unemployment rate as high as it is today," continues Raum.

"It was 7.2 percent when President Ronald Reagan defeated Walter Mondale in 1984."

That doesn't inspire confidence, especially since Obama has shown a marked inclination to lecture people (one of the prominent criticisms of Jimmy Carter when he ran against Reagan in 1980).

Even the New York Times, normally a cheerleader for the Obama administration, has found it hard to put a positive spin on this.

"Economists can explain away a month or two of disappointing numbers," writes the Times' Shaila Dewan. "But this was the third consecutive disappointing monthly performance by the job market, following a winter of solid gains, convincing many that the economic recovery has, for the third year in a row, lost momentum."

Three strikes and you're out.

I can't watch this.

Burning Down the House

---

---

The seemingly irreconcilable conflict over the debt ceiling has the potential to burn down the nation's economic house — and, with it, the political house as well.

Let me backtrack a bit.

There just wasn't anything good about last week's jobs report. It was bad news across the board. For all incumbents. No matter on which side of the fence you may stand.

It's probably worse for Democrats right now since they hold the White House and the Senate. Republicans hold only the House, but there is no reason for them to feel smug, either. And that certainly doesn't mean that House Democrats or Senate Republicans are immune (although a case could be made for Senate Republicans).

No incumbent can assume that he/she is safe because the incumbents are responsible for making the system work — and it ain't working.

Unemployment went up for the third straight month. Many economists had been anticipating at least a modest rebound for the American economy, with fuel prices easing and all that.

But I guess I should have known something wicked this way came because gas prices around here have been going up lately. (I don't know what they've been like where you live, but I paid about $3.38/gallon a couple of weeks ago at the station down the street and today, the price at that very same station is $3.59/gallon.)

And then came what I have often heard described as a bucket of cold water on the recovery — the unemployment rate is the highest it has been since last September.

My friends who support Barack Obama don't like to hear this because it contradicts their cozy view of the world — but his Republican opponent in 2012 is going to be much less important than his record in office — and that record is not too great right now.

Oh, they like to remind me that George W. Bush was president when the economy went south, and they like to recite Obama's legislative achievements, but the bottom line is that fingerpointing and a list doesn't put food on the table or keep a roof over your head.

They like to tsk, tsk among themselves and shake their heads disapprovingly over the possibility of facing an extremist like Michele Bachmann or Newt Gingrich or Sarah Palin in the general election because they think the choice is obvious if that comes to pass. In fact, as far as they are concerned, it isn't a choice at all — so they keep talking about those rivals because they are certain that those candidates are not electable.

And they'd like to see one of them win the GOP nomination. Then, as they see it, the election will become a slam dunk for Obama.

But it isn't going to be that simple.

Oh, I expect the Republicans to nominate someone who is more conservative than Obama. That's a given. The Republicans are the conservatives in our political universe, the Democrats are the liberals. And, in today's Democrat Party, anyone to the right of Nancy Pelosi is considered suspect.

It's no better on the Republican side, where anyone to the left of John Boehner tends to be regarded as a RINO.

That leaves an incredibly large bloc of politically homeless Americans in the middle who are being stretched too thin by two polarized parties, and I think more Americans may well be receptive to the idea of a third party or an independent candidate than they have been for a couple of decades.

Unless an insurgent candidate pops up to challenge Obama for the nomination, we already know who will be nominated by the Democrats. I doubt that the Republicans will nominate an extremist, but, contrary to all the discussions I hear, I also doubt that it will matter.

The dynamics of a race that features an incumbent are entirely different from the dynamics of a race that has no incumbent on the ballot. Obama won a non–incumbent race in 2008. Now, he must win a different kind of race. Historically, the rules for such a race are crystal clear.

If the incumbent is meeting or exceeding expectations, like Ronald Reagan in 1984 or Bill Clinton in 1996, he will win, possibly in a landslide. If not (see the gentlemen who were replaced by Reagan and Clinton four years earlier — when many disaffected Americans opted for an independent candidate rather than either of the major–party nominees), he will be defeated, again possibly in a landslide.

What will matter is what conditions are like when the voters go to the polls — and we can't know, in July 2011, what those conditions will be in November 2012.

No, sir, voters are not fortune tellers, and they can be fickle. What they like today they may very well dislike tomorrow — and vice versa — but they do have an idea which way the wind is blowing right now — and it isn't at their backs.

Relentlessly high unemployment has dragged consumer confidence to its lowest level in three years, writes Vicki Needham in The Hill — and who knows where consumer confidence will be on Election Day?

I do know that the electorate has been impatient lately. How could the incumbents possibly have missed that fact? In House elections, where the volatility has been more pronounced, one party has taken at least 20 seats from the other in the last three elections.

Is that significant? You tell me. Prior to 2006, it was extremely rare for either party to take as many as 10 seats from the other in a single election. If a double–digit movement did occur, it was considered a shift of seismic proportions. In the last three elections, more than 100 House seats have flipped from one party to the other.

Here's something else: The first of July has come and gone with no one, to my knowledge, observing that it was the second anniversary of the date when the recession was said to have ended.

Two years of "recovery" have brought zero net movement in the unemployment rate — yet Obama's top political adviser is deep in denial, insisting that Americans won't care about the jobless rate when they go to the polls.

Nonsense. It's the only issue many voters do care about.

The Deficit Debate

---

---

Christiane Amanpour just might have heard it all in her career as a journalist.

She was primarily a foreign correspondent in nearly 20 years with CNN, doing most of her work in the Middle East. She had to dodge a lot of bullets and bombs.

Thus, I would think that a tour of Wisconsin town hall meetings with Rep. Paul Ryan would be relatively tame by comparison.

But it wasn't. Not when Ryan told Amanpour that the deficit will be "the greatest topic of the 2012 election."

Excuse me?

I'm inclined to agree with Jonathan Cohn, who writes in The New Republic that the emphasis is on the wrong thing.

"[T]he trouble isn't that the economy is deteriorating," he writes. "It's that the economy hasn't recovered from the deterioration that took place in 2008 and 2009."

His argument is that the economy needs a boost.

My argument is that such a boost will come when anything and everything that can be done to encourage job creation is being done.

It's the same argument, really. Cohn essentially says that millions of Americans still need jobs — and both parties are wasting precious time arguing about the deficit.

The importance of the jobs situation should be obvious to someone like the president, who fancies himself to be as politically sure–footed as they come. Yet he has launched a re–election campaign that openly appeals to three groups that played prominent roles in 2008 — young voters, blacks and Hispanics — even though all three continue to suffer.

It is as frustrating — and pointless — as the bickering between the Republicans and Democrats about what can be done to lower gas prices. Jeff Mason of Reuters calls it "symbolism and sympathy" — and, although he directs his criticism largely at the president, it could apply to congressional Republicans as well.

It's the way politics is played in America these days, no matter which party is in control. There's always a smoke screen to divert attention from the things that need to be discussed, and I fear 2012 will be no different.

The Job Isn't Finished

A couple of months ago, James Pethokoukis of Reuters observed that, for Barack Obama, the number for re–election may not be 270 (as in the number of electoral votes that are needed) but 215 (as in how many thousands of jobs need to be gained — on average — every month between now and November 2012 if the unemployment rate is going to drop below 8%).

Well, actually, Pethokoukis reported that Matt McDonald, an analyst for Hamilton Place Strategies, made that observation.

No matter who said it, I was reminded of that number when yesterday's jobless report came out. Lo and behold, 216,000 jobs were added in March.

Mission accomplished — for March.

That is a significant number, and it will continue to be significant for Obama's electoral hopes because, as McDonald told Pethokoukis, the national unemployment rate has been above 7% in only four presidential election years since 1960. The incumbent was on the ballot each time — and, in three of those elections, the incumbent was defeated.

The exception was Ronald Reagan, who had seen unemployment drop by 1.3 percentage points in the year leading up to his re–election campaign.

So, using that as an historic yardstick, Obama needs unemployment, which currently stands at 8.8%, to drop to about 7.5% in order to have the expectation that joblessness won't be the crushing election issue that it was for Presidents Ford, Carter and Bush I.

That still would be higher than the rate under Reagan, McDonald acknowledges, but the decline in a year's time would be comparable, and that should lead to a sense that joblessness is easing.

McDonald gives Obama a break. Based on his calculations, the unemployment rate would slip below 8% — barely — by Election Day.

He sets the bar much lower than I do. I look at it in terms of duplicating what contributed to the only successful re–election strategy under comparable conditions in the last 50 years. To get close to the unemployment rate that still permitted Reagan to campaign plausibly under the slogan "Morning in America," way more than 215,000 jobs need to be added to the economy on a monthly basis.

I'm not an economist, though, so I'll rely on McDonald's figures, and he does make a compelling case:

---

"If we assume a straight–line projection of job growth and further assume 120,000 new entrants to the job market every month, the economy would need to create 215,000 jobs per month every month between now and November 2012 to get the unemployment rate below 8 percent. Every month we are above 215,000 new jobs, it gets a little easier to reach that 8 percent goal and every month we are below 215,000, it gets a little harder."

---

Well, we broke even in March.

According to McDonald's formula, the ultimate goal is neither easier nor harder to achieve than it was before.

There is still much work to be done.

Where Is The Outrage?

---

"More than three years after we entered the worst economic slump since the 1930s, a strange and disturbing thing has happened to our political discourse: Washington has lost interest in the unemployed.

"... [N]o jobs bills have been introduced in Congress, no job–creation plans have been advanced by the White House and all the policy focus seems to be on spending cuts.

"So one–sixth of America's workers — all those who can't find any job or are stuck with part–time work when they want a full–time job — have, in effect, been abandoned."

Paul Krugman
New York Times

---

If you read that excerpt in an opinion piece and had no idea what the identity of the author might be, you'd probably think it came from one of his diehard critics.

Well, perhaps not. But you probably wouldn't think the criticism came from someone who considers himself a liberal.

It did.

Paul Krugman is a widely respected economist. In fact, he is the 13th–most cited economist in the world, according to Research Papers in Economics (RePEc), and he is a self–professed liberal.

Now, I was raised by progressive parents, and, for many years as an adult, I voted accordingly. My politics have shifted more to the center as I have gotten older, but I feel qualified to make the kind of assessment I am about to make ...

... which is ...

I believe there are essentially two kinds of liberals in America today, and you will find them in all walks of life. Some are economists. Some are journalists. Some are economic journalists. Krugman happens to be an economist who is also a journalist.

One kind of liberal cares more about the success of the Obama presidency than the results of his policies — because of (I can only presume) what Barack Obama represents. The logic behind this (and, again, this is my presumption) is that the first black president must be seen as a success because there will not be a second black president if he is not.

For that kind of liberal, perception is more important than reality. When the reality does not support the perception, it is because of racism — or something else that is beyond Obama's control.

To suggest otherwise undermines Obama's presidency.

The other kind of liberal is more realistic. To those liberals, Obama is a president who happens to be black. When he was battling Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2008, it wasn't about black vs. female to those liberals. It was about who could get the job done.

Once the Democrats had settled on their nominee, those liberals backed him enthusiastically, even if they had not done so in the primaries. And now, when they see policies that are not succeeding, they do not hesitate to point that out.

A recent example that comes to mind is Ruth Marcus' column in the Washington Post about seven weeks ago, in which she worried about an absence of leadership in the aftermath of the State of the Union address.

That places policy above all other factors — personality, race, gender, everything — which is how it should be.

I think Krugman is caught somewhere in between. He has not hesitated to criticize policy. In fact, when Congress was voting on the stimulus package in the early days of the Obama presidency, Krugman often criticized it for not being enough — and, with hundreds of thousands of Americans slipping through the cracks two years later, one can only conclude that he was right about that.

But, in spite of the fact that he was so skeptical about the chances of the package's success when he believed that so much more money would be needed to repair the economy, he went along with it — often because (it seemed) that he was willing to give more than the usual amount of time for Obama to become comfortable in the job.

Today, however, Krugman seems to have reached his tolerance limit, and he tells readers, in today's New York Times, that "Washington has lost interest in the unemployed."

He seems genuinely baffled by this since, as he points out, "polls indicate that voters still care much more about jobs than they do about the budget deficit." Thus, he finds it "quite remarkable" that "it's just the opposite" in Washington.

He delves into some economic principles that are probably over the heads of most people, but then he gets back to the point that really ought to outrage the people who voted for Obama expecting him to be the champion and the defender of the average guy, the oppressed, the down–trodden.

"[T]he obsession with spending cuts flourishes all the same," he writes, "unchallenged, it must be said, by the White House."

He now asserts that Obama "surrendered very early" in the "war of ideas" and that it is understandable why most Americans see little difference between what Obama says about spending cuts and what Republicans say. Many Americans who are still employed no longer feel threatened by layoffs because that wave appears to have crested.

But, like the tsunamis that followed the earthquakes in Japan and Indonesia, they have left a great deal of human wreckage in their wake.

The price for this "unfortunate bipartisanship" in Washington, Krugman writes, will be paid by "[t]he increasingly hopeless unemployed."

"[Y]ou have to wonder," Krugman writes, "what it will take to get politicians caring again about America's forgotten millions."

Perhaps it's time for a bumper sticker that says "I'm unemployed and I vote."

Word Games

When you've been out of work for awhile, you really start to notice the word games that politicians play with job numbers.

Take today's jobs report, for example. It kind of reminded me of the reaction in June 2009 to the news that fewer jobs had been lost in the previous month than expected. The losses were still in double digits and the unemployment rate climbed to 9.4% when economists had predicted it would go up to 9.2%.

But the focus was on the fact that the pace of job losses was slowing. Things were getting better, we were told. Folks in the administration hailed the report as proof that things were moving in the right direction.

Hold your horses, I warned people. Let's see what happens in the next two or three ... or more ... months. But no one heard me. The sound of popping champagne corks was too loud, I suppose.

Reality slapped some folks in the face the next month. Job losses were worse than expected, nearly half a million.

Anyway, back to today's report.

The economy added jobs, which was good, but it added one–third fewer jobs than expected, which was not so good.

However, the unemployment rate dropped by 0.3 percentage points, to 9.4%, which was better than expected.

And that is what Barack Obama preferred to emphasize. "The trend is clear. The pace of hiring is beginning to pick up," he said upon hearing the news.

If that is, indeed, what we are witnessing, then that is a good thing, to be sure.

But, once again, I counsel my fellow Americans to wait and see if this really is an indicator of a long–term trend — or an exception to the rule.

And, while it is good that the president offers words of hope and encouragement to those who are struggling to find full–time work (something he has rarely done in the first two years of his presidency), he doesn't mention that one of the reasons that the unemployment rate has dropped is because it only counts those who have not exhausted their unemployment benefits.

Those who have exhausted their benefits are simply not counted. Whether they have found employment or not is irrelevant.

The president also doesn't talk about how many of the jobs that were created in December were of a temporary, seasonal nature. Not too much demand for shopping mall Santas and extra gift wrappers in March.

Sometimes this kind of talk can generate similar talk, and a kind of momentum gets going. If something like that happens and employers decide to just start hiring people en masse, that's great.

But let's wait a few more months before we open the champagne bottles.

Imperial Hubris

---

"Mr. Obama and the Democrats have wasted the once–in–a–lifetime opportunity handed to them in the 2008 election. They did not focus on jobs, jobs, jobs as their primary mission, and they did not call on Americans to join in a bold national effort (which would have required a great deal of shared sacrifice) to solve a wide range of very serious problems."

Bob Herbert
New York Times

---

At least once in every presidency, it seems that a president is said to have squandered a golden opportunity that had been given to him by the voters or fate or whatever.

More than once, for example, I have heard George W. Bush criticized for failing to use September 11 as a way to unite a divided America in a common cause. In fact, he did precisely the opposite. He exploited it for political gain. He used it to drive wedges between people, between races, between faiths.

I will always believe that Bush was a terrible president, but, in all fairness, he did nothing most other presidents did not do. He just had far worse results than most — perhaps because he utilized far worse tactics than most.

What did he do?

Well, he bought into the myth that the president is infallible. And when a president is seduced by that particular myth, inevitably he makes at least one bad choice — and then spends the rest of his presidency, if not his life, justifying and rationalizing.

I don't know when this idea of infallibility took hold. But most presidents seem to have concluded — even if they entered the presidency as "men of the people" — that they know best. The transformation seems almost biblical. Apparently, all one must do to become infallible is to repeat the presidential oath of office.

Maybe there is something magical about that oath. Or maybe the American people are just natural enablers. That might explain a lot.

I suppose the attitude at its most extreme was summed up best by Richard Nixon, who told David Frost, "[W]hen the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."

I have seen no evidence that any other president crossed some criminal threshold in his actions, but history sure is loaded with bad presidential decisions.

And one of the worst may turn out to be Barack Obama's decision to emphasize health care reform over job creation when his presidency began — even though job losses had been increasing for months prior to his inauguration, and they continued, sometimes at alarming monthly levels, through his first year in office. (I criticized Obama in this blog last Labor Day when he declined to make any speeches about the nation's joblessness crisis — a decision that all too clearly demonstrated how much he cared about the unemployed.)

Despite occasional lip service, this president has done little in defense of the unemployed. He only seemed to discover the problem after his party lost its filibuster–proof majority in the Senate with Scott Brown's upset victory in Massachusetts.

That has been a tragic mistake.

The appearance of bipartisanship — so fervently desired that it was claimed to have been achieved if even a single Republican vote was drawn to the Democrats' side in either the House or the Senate — took greater precedence for Obama.

"Employment is the No. 1 issue for most ordinary Americans," writes Bob Herbert of the New York Times. "Their anxiety on this front only grows as they watch teachers, firefighters and police officers lining up to walk the unemployment plank as state and local governments wrestle with horrendous budget deficits.

"And what do these worried Americans see the Obama administration doing? It's doubling down on the war in Afghanistan, trying somehow to build a nation from scratch in the chaos of a combat zone."

From just about this time last year (when Democrat Al Franken was declared the winner in Minnesota) until this past January (when Brown won the seat that had belonged to Ted Kennedy), the Democrats could have done anything they wanted and the Republicans would have been virtually powerless to stop them. Why didn't they?

Why didn't they?

It's no wonder to me that people feel a disconnect between themselves and their government.

Want to know what really astonishes me? The administration's blase attitude toward unemployment in general has been stunning, but its apparent lack of interest in the joblessness epidemic among the nation's older workers truly is appalling.

Perhaps Obama isn't as smart as I gave him credit for. I mean, the numbers have shown that those who routinely vote in midterm elections are not the liberals or the young or the blacks — the groups that showed up in unprecedented numbers to elect Obama in 2008. Midterm voters tend to be older Americans. And CNN reported a few days ago that older Americans, particularly those 55 and older, who find themselves out of work face an especially daunting task in finding new jobs.

Doesn't common sense suggest that a president whose party holds majorities in both houses of Congress would want to do anything he could to appease older voters in a midterm election year? Including promoting legislation that would reward employers for hiring older Americans?

But Obama and the Democrats in Congress look backward instead of forward, assigning blame instead of standing up in defense of the jobless. They aren't accomplishing much for the unemployed, are they? A bill that would have extended jobless benefits through November failed. And, while Obama and the Democrats are justifiably proud of their achievement in passing health care reform, the truth in America today is that many must choose between health insurance and their daily expenses. Guess which one wins?

---

"The Obama administration feels it should get a great deal of credit for its economic stimulus efforts, its health care initiative, its financial reform legislation, its vastly increased aid to education and so forth. And maybe if we were grading papers, there would be a fair number of decent marks to be handed out."

Bob Herbert

---

"By nearly 2 to 1," Herbert says, "respondents to the most recent New York Times/CBS News poll believed the United States is on the wrong track. ... Mr. Obama is paying dearly for his tin ear on this topic. Fifty–four percent of respondents believed he does not have a clear plan for creating jobs. Only 45 percent approved of his overall handling of the economy, compared with 48 percent who disapproved."

Some of Obama's diehard apologists may think that is an aberration, but the truth is that other polls (NBC News/Wall Street Journal, Ipsos/McClatchy, Associated Press/GfK, ABC News/Washington Post) have reported similar, if not worse (Rasmussen) findings in recent weeks.

Things may well look different to most people three or four years from now, when the health care reforms are going to start to kick in. But right now, as Herbert points out, "Destitution is beckoning for those whose unemployment benefits are running out."

No matter what the Labor Department's figures tell you in a few days, most of America's unemployed could probably tell you they've had a bellyful of change.

But they're running short of hope.

What I Wish For ...

... is, no doubt, what millions wish for. Even if they don't know it.

I wish more people would read Bob Herbert's column for the New York Times. The ones who really need to read it, though, are Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and their Democratic colleagues in Congress.

Maybe they do. Sometimes.

And, since so many Democrats seem bewildered by their fall from grace with many voters, they particularly need to read today's column, which is headlined "The Source of Obama's Trouble."

In his unique way, Herbert gets right to the heart of the matter when he asserts that Democrats are in trouble "because they are not urgently and effectively addressing the issue that most Americans want them to: the frightening economic insecurity that has put a chokehold on millions of American families."

Herbert observes that "millions upon millions of Americans who have lost — or are losing — their jobs, their homes, their small businesses, and their hopes for a brighter future" and laments the fact that Democrats have devoted most of their time and attention to health care "while the nation is desperate for jobs, jobs, jobs."

Herbert has been baffled — as have I — by the Democrats' blase attitude toward the jobs problem. "The talk inside the Beltway," he writes incredulously, "is that President Obama and the Democrats have a messaging or public relations problem."

Herbert's reaction can only be described as astonishment.

"That's just silly," he writes. "People are upset because they are mired in economic distress and are losing faith that their elected representatives are looking out for their best interests."

How could it be any more basic than that?

But Herbert spells it out for them. "It's not the message that's a problem for Mr. Obama and the Democrats," Herbert says, "it's the all–too–clear reality."

Annalyn Censky of CNNMoney.com has an unpleasant piece of reality for the unemployed today: nearly three–quarters of employers do not anticipate a change in their hiring plans through June.

"[I]t will take 11 million or more new jobs to get us back to where we were when the recession began," Herbert writes. "The many millions of new jobs needed to make a real dent in the employment crisis are not going to materialize by themselves. Mr. Obama and the Democrats don't seem to understand that."

But their success in the 2010 midterms depends on it. When voters are frustrated, they take out their frustrations on the party in power. Don't believe me? Read your history.

Of course, the only available alternative is the Republican Party, and I've heard some Democrats insist that voters have seen the light and will never give power back to the people who caused all this trouble in the first place. That is what psychologists call denial. I think the ones who are practicing it are going to be the first ones who are shocked on election night.

I guess it's easier to give in to the temptation to engage in denial when news reports tell you that job openings went up earlier this year and that rising energy prices will be easier to absorb because various factors have kept the demand down. Talk about reaching for a silver lining.

Look, when you're angry and you want to punish the party in power, you won't be too choosy about the instrument you use to inflict the punishment. The fact that the Republicans are the only option may actually be a plus for some especially cranky voters. After all, many voters may rationalize, what better way to get a message across than by giving power to the Democrats' arch enemies?

"The Republican Party has nothing in the way of solutions to Americans' economic plight," writes Herbert. "It is committed only to the demented policy of trying to ensure that President Obama and the Democrats fail.

"But the fact that the Republicans are pathetic and destructive is no reason for the Democrats to shirk their obligation to fight powerfully and relentlessly for the economic well–being of all Americans," Herbert writes. "There is a staggering backlog of discouraged workers who would show up tomorrow if there were a job to be had."

The longer there is no place for them to go, the more time they have to think about how frightened and angry they are.

Making Sense of the Jobs Report

---

---

I've been trying to figure out what today's jobs report was telling us, and I have come to the conclusion that I definitely ... don't know.

Even the folks in the media seem torn on what the message is.

For example, Bloomberg.com emphasized the fact that unemployment held steady at 9.7% "and payrolls fell less than forecast."

That's kind of what BusinessWeek said. BusinessWeek wrote about the stabilizing job market — and how the winter storms that socked major population centers in the East turned what would have been a positive into a negative. That's pretty much what Barack Obama said, although he insisted that the job losses were "more than we should tolerate."

Yes, those job losses are always the fly in the ointment, aren't they?

That's the unrelenting drumbeat that is set against whatever "good" news may be contained within the jobs report these days, and I presume it is the reason that CNNMoney.com, which is frequently supportive of the president and his approach to the economy, saw the news as a mixed bag.

Friday's report was a prime example of this economy's contradictory nature. It certainly wasn't that clearcut a year ago. I guess it's been that way for more than two years now. It was just more dramatic — everyone, you may breathe a sigh of relief — through most of 2009 than it has been lately. But that doesn't mean we're out of the woods yet.

Is there any validity to the argument that, if the weather hadn't been as severe as it was in February, we wouldn't have lost as many jobs as we did? Or that jobs actually would have been created if the weather had been better? Maybe — and maybe not. In my life, I have lived through a few recessions, and I've seen many months when the weather was less than ideal — snowstorms in winter, heat waves in summer, tornado seasons, hurricane seasons, torrential rains. I may have forgotten something, but I don't recall the weather being considered a major factor contributing to increases in national joblessness. Regional joblessness, either long– or short–term, perhaps. State and local joblessness, either long– or short–term, certainly. But nationally?

Some people think "not as bad" is the same thing as "good." I don't — although I will concede that "not as bad" translates to "better than it has been." Mitt Romney, on the other hand, criticized Obama because he did not focus on job creation from the start and, therefore, had "prolonged the recession."

That doesn't necessarily suggest that the jobs report isn't evidence that we're moving in the right direction. What it is suggesting, it seems to me, is that we didn't start moving in this direction as soon as we should have.

And, on that point, at least, I would venture that Romney probably won't encounter too much opposition among the unemployed.

Whether one is a Republican or not, there appears to be a sizable segment of the electorate that agrees with Romney's assessment. And, no matter what happens, I guess there are always people who are ready to exploit an issue that may be totally unrelated to enhance their own agenda. If the economy looks grim, writes Robert Reich in Salon.com, the answer is to pass health care reform.

Well, I guess that makes more sense than the logic that prevailed in America six years ago, when many of the problems that have contributed to this disaster were percolating. There were some ominous signs in those days, and they should have been discussed in full, but the voters were distracted by a red herring — gay marriage.

Now, the senators who were elected that year are facing the voters again. This time, the Democrats are in control. Maybe health care reform will carry the day. After all, it isn't just against something. It does offer benefits that can be realized — eventually — so supporting health care reform isn't just an "anti" vote, although it certainly is against the high cost of health care. It's a "pro" vote when the question is, "Shall we lower health care costs?"

But even those who agree that health care costs need to be controlled do not agree on how to achieve that objective. And some people don't see a relationship between health care costs and joblessness.

I have a friend who has been out of work longer than I have — which, in my mind, seems like an endurance test of unimaginable proportions. In my experience, he seems to have the kind of credentials that should insulate one from a bad economy. He got his undergraduate degree in business and his graduate degree in finance.

But this economy is vicious like nothing I have ever seen. And I guess what happened to my friend should have been a warning for me. He lost his job in April of 2008, when five–digit monthly job losses were still considered catastrophic. A few months later, of course, the economic meltdown occurred, and American attitudes were radically altered. For the next 12 months, six–digit monthly job losses were routine. If the fluctuation was in the five–digit range, that hardly raised an eyebrow.

My friend has had a few nibbles in nearly two years but no offers. And I know the pressure must be even greater for him than it is for me. He's married. I'm not. He has children. I don't. His wife does work in the health care industry, though, so he benefits from her income and health coverage. I'm sure, however, that the famiily's standard of living has declined from where it was two years ago.

It amazes me that he has held up as well as he has, and I told him so. He admitted having "shaky moments," but he provided some insight as well.

"I always have to remind myself to review my history when I was down and distraught," he said. "Something better always comes from the rubble. I consider it a growth opportunity now."

There is truth in that. But it is like everything else in life, I guess. Perspectives change. When you're 20, for example, your body can do anything, absorb any blow, overcome deprivation of food or sleep much easier than one can at 30 or 40.

The most extreme example I can think of involves an old friend, whose father had polio when he was a child. He overcame that, but he had several medical crises during his life. He always bounced back, and that was the reality my friend had always known. But, finally, he reached the point where his body couldn't bounce back and he died.

Perhaps economies are like the mortals who function within them. Perhaps, after absorbing enough blows over the years, they just give out.

One hopes that the pace of national growth and recovery won't be so glacial that the economy and most of the unemployed, whether short– or long–term, won't be able to rise from the ashes, like the mythological firebird phoenix, and be reborn in a world that sometimes seems to have passed them by.

Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda

---

"When I think back on all the crap
I learned in high school
It's a wonder I can think at all
And though my lack of education
Hasn't hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall."

Paul Simon

---

A year ago, I was an advocate of the stimulus package — probably mostly for selfish reasons. I've been out of work since August 2008, and I hoped the stimulus would create jobs.

I can't say I believed it would create jobs. But I knew it was the only thing being proposed that had even a sliver of a chance of creating jobs.

And, in the unlikely event that you have forgotten, the economy was losing hundreds of thousands of jobs every month in those days. I wanted the stimulus to create jobs so much that I was even dreaming about it. There was no escape from reality for me, even when I shut my eyes at night and drifted off to sleep.

I guess that was to be expected. The previous six months of my life had been a nightmare. The month I was terminated, the national unemployment rate was 6.0%. Six months later, it was 8.5% — and it has been well over 9.0% for close to a year.

I have never experienced a time in my life that was more hellish. And if there was anything that made it even more frustrating for the unemployed, it was the complete absence of any attempt to do anything by the outgoing administration. Even in November and December of 2008, when unemployment followed a breathtakingly steep trajectory that took it from around 6.5% to 8.5% in a matter of weeks, nothing was done by the Bush administration.

For those who were looking for work at that time, it was like trying to climb a mountain while an avalanche came down around you.

But there was, as I say, a glimmer of hope coming from the stimulus. When congressional leaders hammered out a compromise of the House and Senate versions, Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson strutted for the cameras and said, "Call us the jobs squad."

Barack Obama signed the legislation into law and said, "Today does not mark the end of our economic troubles. But it does mark the beginning of the end — the beginning of what we need to do to create jobs for Americans scrambling in the wake of layoffs; to provide relief for families worried they won't be able to pay next month's bills; and to set our economy on a firmer foundation."

It's hard to imagine, looking back over the last year, that the stimulus has created any jobs. The latest unemployment rate is lower than it's been, although the numbers show that 20,000 jobs were lost in January.

To be fair, though, I guess the stimulus did create some jobs. It must have. The conservative Washington Times reports that Republican lawmakers secretly sought stimulus funds for projects in their states even while they were criticizing it in public.

I assume that the projects that received stimulus funds did create some jobs. Other than that, though, I can't imagine how the stimulus did much to ease the joblessness problem in this country.

And, frankly, it's tough to prove that the stimulus funds created any jobs. It might even be tougher to prove than it is to prove that jobs have been saved.

Recently, I've been hearing talk about a second stimulus. Actually, I've been hearing that kind of talk since last summer. And I think it is going to be a tough sell for some centrist Democrats in the Senate who face tough re–election campaigns.

Especially if they are from one of the 35 states where employers are having to pay more for unemployment insurance taxes, a development that seems certain to restrict hiring.

But what else can be done when jobless claims have exploded and unemployment funds have been unable to keep up?

It's part of the price to be paid for neglecting unemployment, and I think incumbents in both parties should be held accountable by the voters. But many of them probably won't be.

Today, in spite of all his talk about emphasizing jobs and the urgency of putting America back to work, Obama indicated he was willing to take "incremental steps" on job creation legislation — which sounds a lot like more delay, more squandering of precious time.

I can understand how now, in the hostile midterm environment, it is a smart political move to get as many Republicans on board as possible. It's political cover, if nothing else.

But I'm skeptical, given their record, that any Republicans will go along on this ride down the Bispartisanhip Trail. The Democrats may have to take this trip alone, even though I'm sure they would rather not.

In this economy — combined with this political environment — I guess the majority only gets one chance to do something with the help of the minority. The Democrats didn't get as much help as they would have liked, but now, with elections on the horizon, it seems ridiculous for them to think they might get Republican assistance on just about anything.

I guess, if they had been blessed with the gift of seeing the future, the Democrats would have done something to encourage job creation long before Republicans won Ted Kennedy's Senate seat.

They could have done something sooner. They should have done something sooner.

But they didn't.

The Deceit of Numbers

---

---

Can anyone explain to me what the jobless numbers that were released today are really saying?

I've been following the jobs numbers intently ever since I was terminated, but rarely has it been easy for me to comprehend what they were trying to tell me. Truth is, I was never much of a mathematician when I was growing up. When I was in school, I remember being told by my math teachers that numbers don't lie. That notion appealed to me, even if the numbers were something of a mystery, because it reflected the reverence my parents had for truth, a reverence they passed along to me.

And, even though my leaning, first as a journalism student and then as a practicing journalist, was to words, I could see a certain logic in the claim that numbers didn't lie. I knew quite well that words were open to interpretation. But numbers were not.

At least, that is what I believed when I was growing up.

But now I tend to agree with fictional pollster/political operative Joey Lucas on The West Wing, who told Josh that numbers lie all the time.

That, I believe, is because of the assumptions that people attach to numbers, and, in this economy, that seems to be particularly true of unemployment numbers. Raw jobless numbers seem to be contradictory, anyway, and it isn't helped by the fact that everyone, on the political right and the political left, manipulates them.

The numbers themselves don't lie. I mean, five of anything is still five, right? The lie is to be found in the interpretation.

---

---

I offer, as Exhibit A, this morning's home page of the New York Times website.

As you can see, the headline on the story about the unemployment report says, "Labor Market Shows Signs of Reawakening in New Data."

But is that really what the story says?

Actually, no. The story does report that the unemployment rate went down, from 10.0% to 9.7%, but the economy added no jobs. In fact, it lost 20,000 jobs — which isn't nearly as many as the economy was losing a year ago but it's still a net loss.

And the Times conceded the "unusual degree of statistical uncertainty" in the latest jobs report.

"The Labor Department revised past data to show that the economy comprised 1.36 million fewer jobs in December than previously thought," report Peter Goodman and Javier Hernandez. "The revisions showed the economy lost 150,000 jobs in December — far more than the 85,000 initially reported.

"The report also featured a new way in which the government estimates the population, which is used to calculate the unemployment rate. That prompted some economists to dismiss the drop in joblessness as a statistical quirk."

Like all the other unemployed Americans, I would like to believe that the numbers really do indicate that a "reawakening" is under way in the labor market.

But I can only conclude that the deception continues.

Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell

We are now about two days removed from the State of the Union speech.

As many have observed, the administration's emphasis has shifted from health–care reform to job creation. As one of the long–term unemployed, that is a priority change that I welcome. I feel it is long overdue.

I have said this many times before, but there is no reason not to say it again at this time. Health care reform is important. It needs to be done. But we have to put people back to work first.

Now, I understand that the government can't create jobs. But it can do things to encourage the creation of jobs.

As the major component of his strategy, Barack Obama has resurrected a promise from the campaign trail. About 15 months ago, when Obama entered the final three weeks of the campaign, he pledged to an audience in Ohio that he would give tax credits to businesses that hired Americans in 2009 and 2010.

But, apparently, the idea was abandoned when it failed to get adequate traction in Washington. I'm not an economist, but I felt, at the time, it was the only really promising proposal for dealing immediately with joblessness that I had heard from Obama. And I was disappointed when it was not included in the stimulus package.

Why wasn't it? I don't know the details. The credit that Obama promised was $3,000. Apparently, that amount was not sufficient. "If you have a company and you're selling fewer shingles, $3,000 isn't going to get you to hire somebody when your sales are shrinking," New York Sen. Chuck Schumer said more than a year ago.

Well, that sounds logical. And that logic seems to have been bipartisan. Both Democrats and Republicans apparently objected to the tax credit proposal.

I don't know if Obama and his advisers dug in their heels to any extent when the subject was being discussed. I don't know how hard they fought for it. But the fact that it wasn't included in the stimulus qualified it as a "broken promise," according to PolitiFact.com.

Did they raise the ante before giving in — even with a proposal of a superficial increase so they could save face and still preserve their political capital for their health care reform battle? Or were they more committed to the idea than that? Did they say, "Well, if the amount of the credit isn't enough, how much would be?"

If they didn't, perhaps that is their strategy now.

I can only assume that this tax credit proposal is an idea in which Obama has some faith because he brought it up again last month in a speech at the Brookings Institution. But, at the time, I heard nothing about the amount of the tax credits.

Well, the inadequacy of $3,000 tax credits once again appears to have been an issue. So now, Obama is proposing a $5,000 tax credit per employee hired. But small business owners again say it isn't enough.

So let me ask you something:

• If health care reform has been put on the back burner, which apparently it has,


• and if the focus now is on job creation, which apparently it is,


• and if Obama is serious when he says that he wants to encourage small businesses to hire the unemployed and he believes in this proposal, which apparently he does, even though it was shot down a year ago,


• and if this tax credit idea is the most significant weapon he has in his arsenal, which it appears to be,


• and if small businesses are saying the amount of the tax credit that is being proposed is not sufficient, which apparently they are,


• why not raise the amount of the tax credit to an amount that will make it worth a small business' time and expense to bring on new hires, even hires who have little or no relevant experience?

Even if it is an amount that, under normal circumstances, would be considered extreme, wouldn't that be preferable to another stimulus package that is loaded with pork?

That's the problem, isn't it? These aren't normal circumstances. I didn't major in economics, but my best guess is that a textbook recession would be one that lasts a few months, unemployment takes a short and modest hit and everything follows a clear and recognizable pattern.

This recession is 2 years old, millions of jobs have been lost and there doesn't seem to be anything remotely recognizable about the pattern that may or may not be leading us into a recovery phase. Contrary to what many economists have said, most Americans say they believe a recovery will not begin for at least another two years.

In other words, we're in uncharted waters here.

To be sure, another stimulus package may yet be necessary. Americans have been through many recessions, and economists may tell you that they follow certain patterns, but each is different, it seems to me, each is one of a kind. It may be mild, it may not. Anyway, this is, by almost every account I've read or heard (never mind my own), the most severe economic downturn that nearly all adults living today have experienced. It may require a unique and extensive combination of measures before it is finally tamed.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the most urgent challenge to encourage job creation? And, apparently, the point behind this particular proposal is to encourage job creation by offering a financial incentive for businesses. But if the incentive isn't large enough, what good is it?

Of course, the greater the tax credit is, the more checkpoints may be required. Every effort should be made to prevent businesses from taking advantage of these credits — and the people they are designed to help.

I believe we should do whatever must be done, spend whatever amount must be spent to put the unemployed back to work. It surely will add to the debt in the short term, but won't that be made up for rather quickly by the increase in working Americans who buy the goods and pay the taxes and are able to be full–fledged contributors to the economy once again?

Won't these job credits help make them better citizens — which, in turn, makes a better America?

Isn't that the ultimate goal?

It's All About Access

In general, Americans seem to have the attention span of gypsy moths.

Lately, that attention has been focused on the attempted Christmas Day bombing and Janet Napolitano's mishandling of it.

Don't get me wrong. Security is extremely important. But, like most things, I expect this matter to recede from view, and something else will move to center stage.

I hope that something else is job creation. I feel it has been getting the short end of the stick, and it is a very important issue for me because, as my regular readers know, I am one of the unemployed. And my situation is getting worse. My unemployment benefits have expired, and my COBRA coverage runs out at the end of next month.

So when public attention shifts — perhaps later this week when the Labor Department releases the latest jobs report — I would like to see it shift in the direction of job creation, but if that's going to happen, the voters are going to have to turn up the heat. This president has shown a disturbing tendency to pre–empt things he doesn't want to talk about.

Even when he is supposedly addressing them.

It has been my opinion for a long time that he does this because he doesn't know what to do about it — although he sure sounded like he knew what to do when he was campaigning for the job. Now that he's got it, though, he's been passing the buck on unemployment.

At the much–ballyhooed "jobs summit" last month, Obama spoke of how important it was to find once again "a sense of seriousness of purpose," then claimed, absurdly, that, during his trip to Asia in November, "not one" of the journalists who interviewed him asked him about the economy or Asia. He then indulged in some partisan diversionary tactics by claiming that he had been asked if he had read Sarah Palin's book.

The implication was that the shallow media had more interest in whether he read Palin's book than his thoughts on the continent he was visiting or the economy in the country he had been elected to lead. The media, which has rarely passed on an opportunity to gush over "The One," should have been outraged by that. It was patently false, and PolitiFact.com proved it.

"We decided to check the transcripts to see what Obama was asked on his trip. We wanted to see if it was true that he hadn't been asked any questions about the economy or Asia," PolitiFact.com writes.

"We reviewed the transcripts and found several examples to contradict Obama's statement. On Asia, Chuck Todd of NBC News asked Obama about human rights in China, and Major Garrett of Fox News asked Obama about trade agreements with South Korea. Both Todd and Garrett asked about the administration's efforts to create jobs. Todd asked how the announced jobs summit would actually create jobs, and Garrett asked if job creation efforts would add to the deficit. ...

"The other interviews we found were with Ed Henry of CNN and Chip Reid of CBS News. ... Henry also asked a viewer question about what Obama was doing to hold banks accountable for lending to startups and refinancing mortgages."

Now, if he doesn't remember being asked about job creation by reporters from NBC News and Fox News, I'm sure he won't give a second thought to an inquiry from me.

But he's my president. I live in the United States, and he is president of the United States. And no matter how affordable he thinks he's going to make my health insurance, nothing is affordable if you have no job. So, the way I see it, job creation should be his top priority. But it hasn't been.

If the president reads my blog, he would know how I feel about that. But I'm sure he doesn't — although, if you have visited the White House's website, you have seen that there is a link to a White House blog. That blog doesn't appear to have been written by the president (unless he's been doing some ghostwriting), but I assume that those who do write for the blog conduct internet searches to see what bloggers are saying about the president and his policies.

And, if that is true, then someone in the administration must have stumbled across my blog at some point in the last year.

Well, time is short for me. I don't have the luxury of being able to wait for someone in the West Wing to find my blog and read what I have to say about this problem. So today, I went to the White House's website to send a message to the president.

But this White House, which told us it wanted to be the most accessible in history, doesn't make that task terribly easy.

The first problem is that, to send a message to the president or the vice president or either of their wives, you first must click on a link labeled "Contact Us." Each site does things its own way, but, in my experience, most sites label an e–mail link "E–mail." In my experience, a link labeled "Contact Us" takes the visitor to a page where the individual e–mail addresses can be found. Then you click on the one you want. So "Contact Us" means an extra step. My mind instinctively directs me to look for a shortcut.

Perhaps we could consider that a design flaw. Maybe changing the label to "E–mail" would resolve that problem. But that is a modest problem compared to others.

Once you arrive at the "Contact the White House" page, you are required to fill in certain information — name, e–mail address, ZIP code, subject (your choices are "Message of Support," "I have a policy comment" and "I have a non–policy comment") and the message itself.

If you say you have a policy comment or a non–policy comment, another pulldown menu pops up giving you a variety of choices that elaborate on your subject. I suppose this helps with organizing and filing the thousands of messages that are received, but it may come across as cumbersome to visitors who feel needlessly detained when something can't be done in lightning speed. If it is seen as cumbersome, a certain portion of the visitors will decide not to leave a message after all. Some might not be of any consequence, anyway, but some might be worth passing along.

If one is frustrated by things that aren't lightning fast, that person probably isn't going to be inclined to type a lengthy message. But if you have a lot to say, be aware that the White House imposes a 2,500–character limit. That isn't as much as you may think it is — even if you're one of those people who likes to use abbreviations like "u" or "r" for "you" or "are."

It is easier to submit a question, suggestion or comment on job creation than it is to find information about job creation policy on the White House's website. To do that, you will have to go to "Issues" and follow that link to "Economy." Clicking on that link will take you to a long list of policies and partisan propaganda.

Scroll down and you will find this brief item on "job creation:"

---

"President Obama's first priority in confronting the economic crisis is to put Americans back to work. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan signed by the President will spur job creation while making long–term investments in health care, education, energy, and infrastructure. Among other objectives, the recovery plan will increase production of alternative energy, modernize and weatherize buildings and homes, expand broadband technology across the country, and computerize the health care system. The recovery plan will save or create about 3.5 million jobs while investing in priorities that create sustainable economic growth for the future."

---

Well, that's not too reassuring in a nation where unemployment has climbed to double digits on this president's watch. It's a lot of talk.

Spending a few minutes on the White House website really seemed to illustrate an article I read only a couple of hours earlier. It was a piece by Rex Murphy in The Globe and Mail in which he explored the reasons why TIME chose not to make Obama the man of the year. "Mr. Obama has exploded his own credentials as the agent of (genuine) hope and change," Murphy writes. "The promise to remodel the essentially harsh nature of modern politics, to seek transformation in the tone and substance of public life, to end Washington's buying and selling, is seen now, and seen very reluctantly such was the real hope he inspired, as empty. His White House is as dagger partisan as Richard Nixon's."

Those Obama apologists who insist on reminding everyone that the economic problems began under the previous president show a distinct lack of comprehension of American political history. Murphy's comparison of Obama to Nixon is appropriate because Nixon was elected, in large part, because of American dissatisfaction over his predecessor's handling of the Vietnam War. But, by the time Nixon's first year in office ended, the American public saw Vietnam as "belonging" to him, not Lyndon Johnson.

Anyway, I left a message for my president. I've been out of work since the week he was nominated, I told him. And I've been waiting for my government to take the lead in encouraging job creation. But it hasn't. I asked him when he was going to do something.

I asked for a reply, and I hope someone sends one. It would be nice to know someone is listening.

It would be even better if something was being done.

A Glimmer of Hope?

Like everyone else, I hope that today's modest decline in the unemployment rate — in raw numbers, it's the smallest decline since the recession began two years ago — means that the seemingly endless monthly six–digit job losses we've seen for more than a year are finally over.

But I don't have a crystal ball — and neither does anyone else. So, until there is evidence that we're adding jobs, I will be wary. Such evidence is accumulated over a period of time, not in a single month.

Even so, the symbolism of this news — coming at the start of the Christmas season — was not lost on the president. "This is good news," Barack Obama said, "just in time for the season of hope."

Internally, he may have been doing cartwheels. Externally, he said the report was "modestly encouraging." I'm glad he tempered his enthusiasm.

Until an actual trend can be identified, it's best for everyone, not just the president, to avoid getting carried away.

As I have often mentioned, I am not an economist, but it seems to me that, while a drop in the job losses is welcome news during the holidays, I wonder how much of an influence seasonal hiring may have on the numbers. Let's wait and see what the numbers look like in January and February.

I am also mindful of the fact that we've been down this road before. The June jobs report was not as severe as expected, and there was much rejoicing — until the next month, when job losses were worse than expected.

Then, in August, we were told the unemployment rate actually had gone down, and, again, there was much rejoicing. But I was aware of what we had been through earlier in the summer, and I urged people not to get carried away.

Sure enough, by Labor Day, the unemployment rate hit a 26–year high, and we were back in the doldrums.

Something is happening, but with these monthly fluctuations, it is hard to tell precisely what. And, in case you hadn't noticed, we're still losing jobs — far fewer than we've been losing, but it's still a negative. And, even when we start adding jobs again, we need to add several million jobs to be where we need to be. Most of the economists I've heard say it will take at least three to five years to reach that point — and that is the overly optimistic appraisal of the situation.

I want to believe that today's report is a sign that things are clearly getting better. Hebrews 11:1 tells us that "faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

That may be appropriate for spiritual matters, but, when the topic is jobs, I prefer something I can see.

The Nagging Unemployment Problem

Are you tired of reading and hearing about the unemployment problem?

Rest assured, the unemployed are tired of it, too.

I know I am. I'm tired of living with it. I'm tired of it slapping me in the face from the time I get up in the morning until the time I go to bed at night — and then returning to invade the one place where I thought I could escape from it, my nocturnal visits to dreamland. It is an unrelenting crisis, a nightmare from which no one — seemingly — can wake up.

But Christina Romer, chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, predicted recently that joblessness probably will "remain at its severely elevated level" through 2010. It ain't going away any time soon.

Today, the New York Times made the case, on its editorial page, for more stimulus.

"Washington is not providing a coherent plan for effective stimulus," writes the Times.

Early this year, the White House naively asserted that unemployment would not go above 8%, but it went racing past that mark only a few months later. Then, during the summer, as the administration went into its full–court press for health care reform, the president and vice president effectively abdicated responsibility by arguing that they "misread" the economy — even though, if you go back and read the texts of Barack Obama's pre–inaugural speeches, you cannot help but conclude that he knew how dire the situation was even before he took office.

Now the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers says the rebound in hiring could be slower than the comparatively sunny forecasts from the White House and economists.

And historian Julian E. Zelizer wonders where is the "recovery" with no jobs?

There will be a price to be paid for this dithering in next year's elections.

"The Senate has been hamstrung for nearly a month over the most basic relief–and–recovery boost: an extension of unemployment benefits," says the Times.

When one takes into account those who have given up actively searching for work and those who are "under–employed," to use the popular word for it, nearly one–fifth of American adults are affected.

It's safe to say that those who manage to survive until November 2010 won't be hamstrung when they cast their votes.

Since politicians in both parties only seem to really care about people when they need their votes, that should provide enough incentive.

But don't count on it.

Whistling Past the Graveyard

I guess I've become numb to all the forecasts this year (and late last year) that erroneously suggested that the end of the recession was at hand — or at least in sight.

Consequently, I am not terribly impressed today with CNNMoney.com's report that "U.S. companies are planning to hire and invest more in the near future."

That conclusion is the result of a National Association for Business Economics survey.

Hold on for a minute or two! Don't start popping those champagne corks just yet.

CNNMoney.com also says the survey revealed a conviction on the part of the economists that "another 175,000 jobs were lost in October." That seems like a key component to me — even though CNNMoney.com doesn't mention it until several paragraphs into the story. I know I'm not an economist, but if the economy is still losing jobs, how is the jobs situation getting better?

The jobs loss may be less than anticipated, but haven't we been down this road before? On at least a couple of occasions this year, jobs losses were lower than expected — and there was much rejoicing. But the economy more than made up for it the following month.

In short ... it may well be true that jobs losses won't be as severe as had been expected/feared when the next jobs report comes out next week. But, at this time of the year, that could be due to employers hiring seasonal workers in (perhaps unduly optimistic) anticipation of the holiday shopping season. So let's be patient this time and wait a couple of months before we proclaim that the economy has turned the corner.

We all want things to get better. But many members of the press seem far too eager (to me) to embrace any modest tidbit of seemingly good economic news as evidence that Barack Obama's policies are working and the recession is over.

Sometimes it seems to me that these things are balanced precariously against other opinions on an invisible scale.

The best example I can think of is an e–mail message I received from a friend. Faced with these optimistic reports, my friend told me that she has always believed that America would face another Depression in her lifetime and she thinks this is it.

So which is it — a recession from which the economy may now be emerging or a Depression that will suck up even more lives and dreams?

Breaking News

The dire situation facing newspapers in America these days is every bit as severe as the unemployment problem.

In many ways, it is worse, I think, because a free press is so important in a democracy. Without it, I see no way for a free nation to remain free because there is no one to fill the watchdog role that literally keeps an eye on what elected officials do — or do not do.

Newspapers have been tumbling like dominoes in the last year or two, and, regardless of where one stands on the political spectrum, that should be a cause of concern for all of us.

A friend of mine sent me an e–mail this week. He observed that the New York Times Co. has decided not to sell the Boston Globe because its financial prospects had "significantly improved."

My friend concluded that this was a sign that the economy is getting better. From a business perspective, I suppose that isn't an unreasonable conclusion.

Unfortunately, his e–mail arrived in my inbox the same day that reports were circulating that the New York Times plans to eliminate 100 newsroom jobs by the end of the year.

So what is one to make of this?

I've heard many theories about the decline of newspapers. As someone who studied journalism in college and worked for newspapers for many years, I suppose I am naturally drawn to this subject. I have written about it in the past, in part to help me understand what is happening, and I see a certain amount of logic in each point that is raised.

I've heard it said, for example, that newspapers are struggling because the quality of writing has fallen. In turn, that has led to a drop in paid circulation.

There's no doubt in my mind that there is a relationship between writing that is weaker (or perceived to be weaker) than it used to be and decreased demand for the product.

But the thing that newspaper people understand that people outside the industry do not is that a drop in paid circulation is like a symptom of a disease. The disease that is killing daily newspapers is the decline in advertising revenue.

It never has been possible to pay all the expenses involved in running a daily newspaper with the revenue of a product that sells for 25¢ or 50¢ a copy. Even if a newspaper could sell its product at the Sunday rate seven days a week, it wouldn't be possible.

But the income from advertising is a different story. When advertising dollars begin to dry up, that's when the writing is on the wall for a newspaper, no matter how good (or bad) its writing is.

I was reminded of this today when I read the latest installment at a blog called The Arkansas Newspaper War. It is devoted to a topic with which I am familiar — the newspaper war between the Arkansas Gazette and the Arkansas Democrat that raged when I worked for the Gazette in the 1980s.

Today, the blog gives grades to the different departments at the Gazette, and the one in which I worked — news — gets an A+. If any of my former Gazette colleagues read this blog — and I know that at least one does — I'm sure that is a source of pride for them, as it is for me.

But then the author of the blog makes an important observation: "The Gazette ... was both weak and strong. Unfortunately, her weakness was in an area vital to success. If the well of ad dollars dries up, a daily newspaper cannot survive."

As the crisis in the newspaper industry has worsened, I've seen and heard a lot of talk about the rise of citizen journalists and internet news coverage taking their toll on daily newspapers. But, like declining paid circulation, they are only symptoms of a much larger problem for daily newspapers.

The real problem is the loss of advertising revenue. Unless newspapers can find someone with really deep pockets to pick up the slack — and it is worth noting that, in its final years, the Gazette's ownership, the Gannett Co., had pretty deep pockets — they cannot continue to exist.

And that is the kind of news that breaks a journalist's heart.