Interactive Feature: Portraits From a Job-Starved City (328 hits)
A photographic tour (with audio interviews) through its stores, factories and offices in Rockford, Ill., where unemployment reached nearly 16 percent last summer.
Three days before Christmas, President Obama gathered his economic team in the West Wing’s Roosevelt Room to review themes for his State of the Union address. The edge-of-the-cliff crisis he inherited had passed, but with more than 14 million Americans still out of work, he was looking for bold ways to bring down unemployment. The ideas presented to him, though, seemed familiar and uninspired. “You know, guys,” he said, according to someone in the room, “I’ve told you before, I want you to come to me with ideas that excite me.” Nothing he was hearing excited him. ...
In his State of the Union address last year, Obama declared that “jobs must be our No. 1 focus in 2010,” then spent much of the year on other issues, some of his choosing, like health care, and others forced upon him, like the Gulf of Mexico spill. “The public didn’t sense that everyone in the White House was waking up thinking about how to create jobs,” said John Podesta, the former Clinton White House chief of staff and president of the Center for American Progress who directed Obama’s transition. “It seemed like they were waking up every day thinking about how to pass more bills. It was like, do something. And if that doesn’t work, do something else."...
