Obama: Unemployment Hot on His Heels

There, it’s done. The U.S. unemployment statistics for 2009 are completed. They are depressing. December could have extended the improvement of November, when 4,000 jobs were created. Unfortunately, the relapse was brutal: 85,000 jobs lost. So much so that, in total, the crisis will have kept the most dismal of its promises, destroying 4.2 million jobs in one year, unprecedented in the history of the Department of Labor since 1939. There are 15.3 million unemployed people in the United States, twice the number that existed two years ago. Incidentally, it is almost the same number as in the Eurozone (15.7 million in November.) The two large and wealthy zones in the West thus bemoan the same unemployment rate, 10 percent of the active population. President Obama has no luck: there will be no new, and potentially rosier, statistic to come into play before January 20, his first anniversary in office. The immense joy of that moment, the wild hopes it had aroused, now seem all but faded. Everyone knows deep down that the president of the United States has little control over the job market, and that his stimulus efforts have for the most part been effective. Yet, he is in power, and being unpopular is a consequence as long as things are going badly; that’s par for the course.

Barack Obama is not a man to shirk his responsibilities. He has personally accepted the fiasco of the security services, which, eight years after the 9/11 attacks, were incapable of connecting their data to prevent a known terrorist-in-training from boarding a flight to the United States. In these circumstances, as president of the United States he adopted the role of commander-in-chief. With a near Pavlovian response, the American public rallied behind the chief executive. Thus far, it is not clear that the failed Christmas attempt will hurt the image of Barack Obama. But he knows that the economic anxiety will soon take over again.

That is why, yesterday, he announced new measures to stimulate job creation — particularly investments in “green” technology financed with the $787 million of TARP money. Additionally, he will take his “White House to Main Street” tour to Middle America to demonstrate that he is taking care of job seekers. Politics are at stake, for sure. At the mid-term elections in November, he does not want to lose his majority in Congress.