“Obama Turns Focus on Middle-Class Jobs.” So read a results-promising headline at Voice of America on May 18. Yahoo! News was equally optimistic a day earlier. The president, it reported, had started on his “Middle Class Jobs & Opportunity Tour,” telling a crowd of factory workers in Baltimore:
Today, I’m directing agencies across the government to do what it takes to cut timelines for breaking ground on major infrastructure projects in half. And what that means is that construction workers get back on the jobs faster, it means more money going back into local economies, and it means more demand for outstanding dredging equipment that is made right here in Baltimore.
What a guy! He is able to grow the economy, put Americans back to work, and chew gum all at the same time. He is even able to find time in his lengthy to-do list to save the planet, persuade the Russians to cut back on their arsenal of nuclear arms, and arrange free preschool for every family in the country.
Someday he’ll have to explain how he managed to do so much in eight short years. Assuming, that is, the Iranians, North Koreans, or some other nation with nuclear capabilities and/or ambition doesn’t blow us off the map.
What is so pathetic about Obama’s latest job push is that is like all his other job pushes. Remember Recovery Summer? Or how about the summer of 2011, when he told a group of veterans at the Washington Navy Yard that “my singular focus is the American people. Getting the unemployed back on the job.”
The reality is that jobs have never been a priority for this president — not when he first came to office firmly resolved to end the economic drought “created” by his predecessor, not in his repeated broken promises to turn his attention from other pressing agenda back to the economy, not ever.
And helping Americans find work is still low man on the totem pole for him because it just isn’t the sort thing you get remembered for. He is more interested in legacy-building initiatives like forcing the country to adopt clean energy, even if it means making war on the coal industry. Never mind that imposing heavy regulations on U.S. coal production will kill, not create, jobs. Never mind either that China and India (which together burn 8 times as much coal as the U.S.) open another four new coal plants between them each week. Nor is there any real likelihood that either of these emerging industrial powers will be cutting back on its “carbon polluting” ways any time soon.
None of that matters a whit to Obama, who is too busy blazing trails to care about a few jobs. Neither is he concerned when he insists, as he did at Georgetown University yesterday, that 97% of scientists agree that global warming is the be-all and end-all of our problems that the doomsday ”consensus” 40 years ago was the reverse. “Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age – Scientists See Ice Age In the Future,” grimly announced the Washington Post on January 11, 1970. ”Is Mankind Manufacturing a New Ice Age for Itself?” asked a nervous L.A. Times on January 15, 1970. Other predictions of the planet heading inexorably for the big freeze are assembled here.
Nor does it matter to him that he has failed repeatedly to sell the American people on Obamacare, which was doomed from the day it passed the Senate via the nuclear option because there weren’t enough Democratic votes to pass it otherwise and no Republican votes at all. This too occupied all of his attention when it should have been focused on jobs.
What all this suggests is that ultimately, barring unforeseen circumstances, Obama will live to hear some other commander-in-chief talk about the “mess he inherited” … from Obama. But in this case, the complaint won’t be empty carping. It will be a fact.
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