Jim McTague uses his latest “D.C. Current” column in Barron’s to re-examine President Obama’s re-election campaign promise to focus on creating jobs.
Back in 2011 and 2012, while he was campaigning for a second term, President Barack Obama appeared to be fixated on fixing our broken economy and creating jobs, especially union jobs. His mantra: “We can’t wait,” which he uttered just about every day, like a man in a hurry to get the job done. He boasted that he’d employ his administrative powers to circumvent Congress and fire up the nation’s stalled economic engine.
Two years later, the economy remains broken, yet Obama never says, “We can’t wait.” The flow of administrative “fixes” has stopped. He offers no new ideas to replace ones that won’t fly with a politically divided Congress. In fact, the only time he talks about the economy is when he’s compelled to—as on job-report Fridays, when the employment figures are too dismal to ignore.
His We Can’t Wait initiative—which had its own Web page—apparently was just a political stunt. Obama’s passion is for growing the federal government, which he confuses with growing the economy. His slapdash proposals, which ranged from designating new national parks to promote tourism to expediting the federal review process for pending transportation and green-energy projects, sounded good, but contributed little to the economy or the union movement.
For example, in March 2012, the president said he’d expedite the permitting process for seven solar- and wind-energy projects, to be erected by private companies on federal land in California, Nevada, Arizona, and Wyoming. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar gushed five months later that the projects “have great potential to grow our nation’s energy independence, drive job creation, and power economies across the West.” This was hype. Construction hasn’t begun on any of the projects and probably won’t until 2016, Obama’s final year in office.
