President Obama pivots to the economy . . . arguably for the second time this month. The RNC collected these “pivots” for a while, until they became as numerous as his statement expiration dates.

Sure, the unemployment rate is down to 7.6 percent, after peaking at 10.1 percent; of course, that’s a slow decline since the beginning of 2012 (8.3 percent). This is still high by historical standards (the unemployment rate was below 7 percent from June 1993 to December 2008) and the unemployment rate’s drop is fueled in part by a steep decline in the labor-force participation rate, from 66 percent of all Americans over age 16 to close to 63 percent.

If you’ve got money in the stock market, you’re enjoying a bullish run. About 30 percent of American households have $10,000 or more in stocks. But for most of the folks who suffered the biggest fall in the Great Recession’s start, back in autumn 2008, economic security is hard to find. Wages are stagnant, and actually slightly less than at the end of 2009.

Asked about the issues that will dominate the 2014 races, the heads of the NRCC and DCCC tell Chuck Todd the economy first, before Obamacare and immigration (admittedly related to the state of the economy), gun control, social issues, etc. The issue of our continuing economic troubles never went away; it’s just that the narrative-setters lost interest. To the political class of both parties, the pain is far away (Washington’s economy is comparatively thriving, even in the Age of Sequester) and their preferred options are blocked by the opposition’s role in government.

White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer assures us, “Over the next several weeks, the President will deliver speeches that touch on the cornerstones of what it means to be middle class in America: job security, a good education, a home to call your own, affordable health care when you get sick, and the chance to save for a secure, dignified retirement.”

What holds back the economy?

• Companies are reluctant to hire the long-term unemployed.
• The increase in home ownership during the past decade made it tougher for workers to relocate for new opportunities in other places.
• Those who are classified “long-term unemployed” have generally lost skills that kept them competitive in the job market; folks who made a good living as Realtors during the housing boom have a tough time participating in, say, the fracking boom.
• Washington and state governments love certain industries — e.g. green-jobs programs that meet 55 percent of their job-placement targets — and hate others, e.g., EPA officials who compare their approach to oil companies to crucifixion.
• Obamacare’s regulations make part-time workers more economically attractive to employers than full-time workers.
• At the beginning of the year, payroll taxes went up, amounting to a 2 percent reduction in most Americans’ take-home pay.

These problems are not likely to be solved by another big-spending “jobs” bill; some of them are probably beyond the capacity of Washington to solve. But the president needs to say something about it — so he will give more speeches, and assure his followers that “if those mean House Republicans would just pass another version of the stimulus I passed in 2009, everything would be fine.”

Folks on the right will find a lot to chew over and a lot to object to in this essay from George Packer in the Guardian (excerpted from his new book), but there’s probably a lot of truth to this section:

The rules and regulations of the Roosevelt Republic were aberrations brought on by accidents of history — depression, world war, the cold war — that induced Americans to surrender a degree of freedom in exchange for security. There would have been no Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial from investment banking, without the bank failures of 1933; no great middle-class boom if the US economy had not been the only one left standing after the second world war; no bargain between business, labour and government without a shared sense of national interest in the face of foreign enemies; no social solidarity without the door to immigrants remaining closed through the middle of the century.

One of the major driving attitudes on the right is a sense that the America we used to knew, the one we grew up in, is slipping away and being replaced with something more divided, nastier, more selfish, less trustworthy; a country whose populace has worse judgment, with far too many citizens incapable of taking responsibility for themselves and their actions. But whatever era you think of as “better days” — the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1980s or 1990s (anyone really want to argue the 1970s were the Golden era?), the trends we see around us make returning to that kind of society nearly impossible. Something better can replace the country we see outside our windows right now, but whatever that “better” will be, it will be different from our idea of the not-too-distant past.

Packer concludes his essay:

Much has been written about the effects of globalisation during the past generation. Much less has been said about the change in social norms that accompanied it. American elites took the vast transformation of the economy as a signal to rewrite the rules that used to govern their behaviour: a senator only resorting to the filibuster on rare occasions; a CEO limiting his salary to only 40 times what his average employees made instead of 800 times; a giant corporation paying its share of taxes instead of inventing creative ways to pay next to zero. There will always be isolated lawbreakers in high places; what destroys morale below is the systematic corner-cutting, the rule-bending, the self-dealing.

Earlier this year, Al Gore made $100m (£64m) in a single month by selling Current TV to al-Jazeera for $70m and cashing in his shares of Apple stock for $30m. Never mind that al-Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar, whose oil exports and views of women and minorities make a mockery of the ideas that Gore propounds in a book or film every other year. Never mind that his Apple stock came with his position on the company’s board, a gift to a former presidential contender. Gore used to be a patrician politician whose career seemed inspired by the ideal of public service. Today — not unlike Tony Blair — he has traded on a life in politics to join the rarefied class of the global super-rich.

It is no wonder that more and more Americans believe the game is rigged. It is no wonder that they buy houses they cannot afford and then walk away from the mortgage when they can no longer pay. Once the social contract is shredded, once the deal is off, only suckers still play by the rules.

Packer is very critical of Republicans, but I’ll bet a lot of grassroots Republicans agree with his closing assessment . . . 

From today’s Morning Jolt…

Forget the Rest of the World; President Personally Calls Some Athlete You Never Heard Of Before

Hey, remember North Korea? They’re detaining a U.S. citizen.

Unless the Syrian rebels figured out some way to fake the presence of Sarin in the bloodstream of some volunteers, the Syrian regime used chemical weapons and crossed the red line… and no one can come up with a way to demonstrate the consequences of crossing that line.

Oh, and the guys we may soon intervene to help, the Syrian rebels, may have just tried to shoot down a Russian airliner.

Remember Boston?

But U.S. Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) told ABC News yesterday that the FBI is also looking into “persons of interest” in the U.S. possibly linked to the Boston bombings.

U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said he’s spoken with the FBI about the probe into possible trainers the brothers had.

“Are they overseas in the Chechen region or are they in the United States?” he said. “In my conversations with the FBI, that’s the big question. They’ve casted a wide net both overseas and in the United States to find out where this person is. But I think the experts all agree that there is someone who did train these two individuals.”

Remember Boston, again?

State lawmakers have launched an investigation into whether the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings improperly received public benefits.

Sources who have seen the 500 pages of documents sent to the House Committee on Post Audit and Oversight told News Center 5’s Janet Wu that the Tsarnaev family — including the parents of the two bombing suspects, the two suspects themselves, their sisters, the widow of the suspect killed and their child — received “every conceivable public benefit available out there.”

Remember the economy?

We’re still stuck in the muck.

That’s the conclusion to draw from the new report on gross domestic product. The U.S. economy grew at a 2.5 percent annual rate in the first three months of the year, which was an improvement from the weak 0.4 percent of the final months of 2012… We’re muddling along at basically the same pace we’ve been at for nearly four straight years of this dismal recovery, with growth too slow to make up the lost economic ground from the 2008-2009 recession.”

National debt? $ 16,756,644,393,707.05,as of Friday. (That’s $16.7 trillion.)

Remember Obamacare?

In total, it appears that there will be 30 million to 40 million people damaged in some fashion by the Affordable Care Act—more than one in 10 Americans. When that reality becomes clearer, the law is going to start losing its friends in the media, who are inclined to support the president and his initiatives. We’ll hear about innocent victims who saw their premiums skyrocket, who were barred from seeing their usual doctor, who had their hours cut or lost their insurance entirely—all thanks to the faceless bureaucracy administering a federal law.

With all of this going on, guess what the top story was on Memeorandum, measuring what bloggers and news sites are writing about?

An NBA player coming out of the closet as gay. Wait, there’s more:

A groundbreaking pronouncement from NBA veteran Jason Collins — “I’m gay” — reverberated Monday through Washington, generating accolades from lawmakers on Twitter and a supportive phone call from President Barack Obama.

Hours after Collins disclosed his sexuality in an online article, Obama reached out by phone, expressing his support and telling Collins he was impressed by his courage, the White House said.

Collins, 34, becomes the first active player in one of four major U.S. professional sports leagues to come out as gay. He has played for six teams in 12 seasons, including this past season with the Washington Wizards, and is now a free agent.

This president can’t get squat done about North Korea or Syria, and so he doesn’t want us to focus on those far-off lands. His policies have done diddlysquat for most of the long-term unemployed. He’s not interested in throwing people off public assistance, even when they don’t deserve it, and he wants to insist that every terror attack is a one-time occurrence, instead of connected bits of an international ideological movement dedicated to killing Americans. Obamacare’s a mess, and he’s hoping you don’t notice. The debt continues to increase, even with the alleged horrors of sequestration.

“God, gays and guns.” That’s what he’s got left. And that’s what he hopes stays on your mind, for as many days between now and November 2014 as possible.

The final Morning Jolt of the week offers a look at what Republicans can learn from Rand Paul, the comedic horror that is our half-baked “Dudes” idea, and then this reflection of a troubled economy:

Understaffed America

One of the first victims of the Great Recession was service. I don’t know about you, but with disturbing regularity I get seated in restaurants . . . and we sit there . . . waiting for someone to greet us, bring menus, ask if we want anything to drink . . . and we’re left waiting for a seemingly interminable time. It’s as if our waiter suddenly retired. Or, you know, it’s like we’re in Europe.

Peggy Noonan is noticing the same thing.

It’s not a debt and deficit crisis, it’s a jobs crisis. The debt and the deficit are part of it, part of the general fear that we’re on a long slide and can’t turn it around. The federal tax code is part of it — it’s a drag on everything, a killer of the spirit of guts and endeavor. Federal regulations are part of it. The administration’s inability to see the stunning and historic gift of the energy revolution is part of it.

But it’s a jobs crisis that’s the central thing. And you see it everywhere you look.

I’m in Pittsburgh, making my way to the airport hotel. The people movers are broken and we pull our bags along the dingy carpet. There’s an increasing sense in America now that the facades are intact but the machinery inside is broken.

The hotel has entrances on two floors. I search for the lobby, find it. Travelers are milling about, but there’s no information desk, no doorman, no bellman or concierge, just two harried-looking workers at a front desk on the second level. The man who checked me in put his phones on hold when I asked for someone to accompany me upstairs . . .

Things are getting pretty bare-bones in America. Doormen, security, bellmen, people working the floor — that’s maybe a dozen jobs that should have been filled, at one little hotel on one day in one town. Everyone’s keeping costs down, not hiring.

What that hotel looked like is America without its muscle, its efficiency, its old confidence.

There are a lot of reasons for this . . . but we’ve added one more reason for a company to try to hobble along with fewer workers than they normally would:

Under ObamaCare, employers with 50 or more full-time workers must provide health insurance for all their workers, paying at least 65% of the cost of a family policy or 85% of the cost of an individual plan. Moreover, the insurance must meet the federal government’s requirements in terms of what benefits are included, meaning that many businesses that offer insurance to their workers today will have to change to new, more expensive plans.

ObamaCare’s rules make expansion expensive, particularly for the 500,000 US businesses that have fewer than 100 employees.

Suppose that a firm with 49 employees does not provide health benefits. Hiring one more worker will trigger the mandate. The company would now have to provide insurance coverage to all 50 workers or pay a tax penalty.

. . . Under the circumstances, how likely is the company to hire that 50th worker? Or, if a company already has 50 workers, isn’t the company likely to lay off one employee? Or cut hours and make some employees part time, thus getting under the 50 employee cap? Indeed, a study by Mercer found that 18% of companies were likely to do exactly that. It’s worth noting that in France, another country where numerous government regulations kick in at 50 workers, there are 1,500 companies with 48 employees and 1,600 with 49 employees, but just 660 with 50 and only 500 with 51.

If service industries cut the staff any deeper, it’s going to start looking like the sets of The Walking Dead in this country.

Earlier this week we discussed the ugly truth about our economic doldrums: that companies aren’t hiring because they don’t think that the additional revenue that they can generate from a new hire is enough to cover the cost of the new employee — not merely wages and benefits, but capital expenditures, training, overhead, regulatory costs, and so on.

In this light, raising the national minimum wage to $9/hour from the current $7.25 is counterproductive. If companies are reluctant to hire people at the current cost, making them $1.75/hour more expensive isn’t going to make them a more appealing option. This may not be a huge factor, but it certainly won’t help.

In the Washington Post, Robert Shapiro, undersecretary of commerce for economic affairs in the Clinton administration, correctly identifies what should be on the minds of policymakers: “The best approach would be to directly reduce the cost for business to create more jobs.”

The problem is that his solution is pretty bad: “Congress could, for example, permanently cut the payroll tax rate for employers and make up the difference for the Social Security trust fund with a modest carbon or value-added tax.”

The payroll tax is 12.4 percent, with 6.2 percent paid by the employer and 6.2 percent paid by the employee. (For 2011 and 2012, the employee paid 4.2 percent.) But it’s hard to believe that high payroll taxes are a primary factor in slow hiring since 2008–09; the rate has been at 12.4 percent since 1990 and above 10 percent since 1979.

Employers may see new hires as too expensive to be worth it, but it’s not the 6.2 percent payroll tax that’s creating that perception. Most likely it’s the much higher health-care costs and training costs. Shapiro briefly mentions the traditional answers of “electronic medical records” and “preventative care.” Except that new studies about the effect of electronic medical records find “evidence of significant savings is scant, and there is increasing concern that electronic records have actually added to costs by making it easier to bill more for some services.”

As for preventative care . . . well, all those tests to detect health problems early that come back negative cost money, too: “The evidence of hundreds of studies over the past four decades has consistently shown that most preventive interventions add more to medical spending than they save.” And this is just for health problems that can be prevented; accidents, gunshot wounds, some diseases, etc.

As for the other idea, creation of a national carbon or value-added tax would make every product instantly more expensive, with horrific results for discretionary spending, purchasing power, and so on.

Of course there’s State of the Union reaction and Rubio-mania in the Morning Jolt, but also an examination of the economic truths you didn’t hear last night, and probably won’t hear from an elected official for a while:

The Ugly Truths About the American Economy Since 2009

Okay, forget what the president said. Why has hiring been so sluggish since the Great Recession began?

I’m going to look at a post from Zero Hedge, an economics-minded blog that is always interesting and sometimes understandable. Charles Hugh-Smith argues:

Those who have spent their careers in government or academia have little idea what it takes to hire more people. Number one is a business with strong demand for one’s products or services. In a developed world with too much of everything except energy, that is no small challenge: the world is awash in over-capacity in every field except niche industries such as deepwater oil rigs.

Second, you need a process that generates so much value (specifically surplus value) that you will generate immediate profits by hiring more people.

If the value added by additional labor is low, then you have no reason to hire more employees, even if Ben Bernanke personally knocked on your door begging you to borrow a couple million dollars at low rates of interest.

If an additional unskilled worker will cost $10 an hour and might generate $100 a day in additional gross revenues, that is $20 in gross profit. But the overhead costs of operating a business are rising faster than inflation: junk fees imposed by cities, counties and states, workers compensation and disability premiums, healthcare costs (if you hire full-time workers), energy costs, and so on.

For most businesses, overhead costs 50% to 100% of total employee compensation–wages plus benefits and payroll taxes. So adding another employee to gross 20% more doesn’t make it worthwhile–it actually generates a loss once overhead costs are paid.

The only time it makes sense to hire another worker is if that worker will create 100% or more surplus value from their labor. For example, a worker paid $200 a day in total compensation generates $400 more in gross revenues–enough to not only support the added overhead but net the business a profit.

In short, the unemployed, the departed-the-workforce, the just-entered-the-workforce and soon-to-enter-the-workforce cannot be sufficiently productive to justify the expense of hiring them. And we know this pretty much has to be true, because corporations are sitting on roughly $1.7 trillion in cash right now. It’s not that they don’t have the money to hire people. They just don’t think that hiring people would generate more money than having it just sit there in their accounts, which is a phenomenally depressing conclusion.

Speaking of those about to enter the workforce, isn’t perhaps one of the fundamental problems facing our economy that we have a lot of English majors and not enough folks who can or are willing to work in fracking? What I mean is, how many of our economic doldrums stem from a fundamental mismatch between the skills of the soon-to-be-working and new workers and the actual work that needs to be done?

Allow me to set your blood to simmer, by pointing to this November Salon article:

In the John Waters-esque sector of northwest Baltimore — equal parts kitschy, sketchy, artsy and weird — Gerry Mak and Sarah Magida sauntered through a small ethnic market stocked with Japanese eggplant, mint chutney and fresh turmeric. After gathering ingredients for that evening’s dinner, they walked to the cash register and awaited their moments of truth.

“I have $80 bucks left!” Magida said. “I’m so happy!”

“I have $12,” Mak said with a frown.

The two friends weren’t tabulating the cash in their wallets but what remained of the monthly allotment on their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program debit cards, the official new term for what are still known colloquially as food stamps.

Magida, a 30-year-old art school graduate, had been installing museum exhibits for a living until the recession caused arts funding — and her usual gigs — to dry up. She applied for food stamps last summer, and since then she’s used her $150 in monthly benefits for things like fresh produce, raw honey and fresh-squeezed juices from markets near her house in the neighborhood of Hampden, and soy meat alternatives and gourmet ice cream from a Whole Foods a few miles away.

“I’m eating better than I ever have before,” she told me. “Even with food stamps, it’s not like I’m living large, but it helps.”

Mak, 31, grew up in Westchester, graduated from the University of Chicago and toiled in publishing in New York during his 20s before moving to Baltimore last year with a meager part-time blogging job and prospects for little else. About half of his friends in Baltimore have been getting food stamps since the economy toppled, so he decided to give it a try; to his delight, he qualified for $200 a month.

Title of that article? “Hipsters on Food Stamps.”

Folks, the art world and publishing world are fiercely competitive even in the very best of times, so you’re going to need a backup career just in case things don’t work out. This also applies to those who aspire to fame and fortune in journalism, professional athletics, the music industry, most of the entertainment industry, and most of the jobs that the world covets. You’ve got to be really talented, and really hard-working. And yes, lucky. I realize I’m very, very, very, very lucky to have a job that I (usually) enjoy and that allows me to make a living. Of course, I suspect those outside those fields overestimate the role of luck. My buddy Cam — now on the Sportsman Channel — will periodically hear from someone, “boy, you’re really lucky to find a job where you get to host a radio show!” and he has to bite his tongue and refrain from mentioning all the years he worked as reporter and assistant news director, driving all over the state of Oklahoma on any assignment he could get, long hours, lousy pay, and so on.

Nobody just hands you a plum job in journalism. Okay, unless you’re Chelsea Clinton, nobody just hands you a plum job in journalism.

Perhaps most unnervingly, perhaps a significant chunk of our younger workforce isn’t really well-prepared to do much of anything. As the intriguing, rarely updated blog The Last Psychiatrist suggested:

It’s hard to accept that the University of Chicago grad described in the article isn’t employable, that the economy doesn’t need him, but it is absolutely true, but my point here is that not only is he not contributing, the economy doesn’t need him to contribute. Which is good, because there’s nothing he can do for it. 1. Anything requiring science is out. 2. “He can work manual labor!” I love how people assume economics doesn’t apply to construction. The demand for those jobs is very high AND hipsters suck at them. At any wage, Gerry the hipster will always be outworked by Vinnie the son of a longshoreman, who will always be outworked by a Mexican illegal, i.e. the system will always be able to find someone who can do the job better AND with lower labor costs . . . 3. Hipsters are not good at retail or sales unless detached irony is required, which it is not, which is why they’re on food stamps.

Of course, we won’t hear many comments in this vein from our policymakers, because it would be perceived as blaming the unemployed for their grim circumstances.

The first Morning Jolt of the week features the shocking news of Pope Benedict’s resignation, a discussion of whether our culture is even capable of the earnest valorization depicted in the Paul Harvey ad, and then these two developments that will shape the political news in the week ahead:

Lindsey Graham: Until the Benghazi Truth Is Told, Your Nominees I Will Hold

A slogan that Johnny Cochran could approve:

Sen. Lindsey Graham said on Sunday he’ll block President Barack Obama’s nominees for Defense secretary and CIA director if the White House isn’t more forthcoming about its response to the attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

“No confirmation without information,” the South Carolina Republican said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Graham said he wants to know if Obama himself phoned his Libyan counterparts during the Sept. 11 attacks in Benghazi and what the results of such a call might have been. Without cooperation, Graham said he’ll try to put a hold on Chuck Hagel, the Defense nominee, and John Brennan for CIA.

“I don’t think we should allow Brennan to go forward to the CIA directorship, Hagel to be confirmed for secretary of Defense, until the White House gives us an accounting,” Graham said. “Did the president ever pick up the phone and call anyone in the Libyan government to help these folks?”

Rick Moran points out this is something of a symbolic maneuver, and one that isn’t likely to work, as long as Senate Democrats remain unified:

The hold is a senatorial courtesy, and threatening to use it is just about all the Republicans have left when it comes to leverage on the White House to get more information about Benghazi. It would be unprecedented to place a hold on a cabinet nomination, and it is likely that Majority Leader Harry Reid would demand a cloture vote in order to lift the hold and bring the nominations to the floor. Several Republicans would probably join the 55 Democrats in voting for cloture, and the president would get his up or down vote on both nominees.

Graham would probably not go along with a filibuster. Hagel and Brennan’s other major critics in the Senate would be equally reluctant. And what he’s asking for from the White House, he is not likely to get. The administration has successfully stonewalled, obfuscated, and brushed off requests for information until Benghazi now seems a distant memory — a bad dream that the president would like the American people to forget.

Obama: Did I Say the Economy Recovered? I Meant I’m Still Working on It!

Our old friend Byron York is a pretty even-keeled guy, but I think he finds it pretty audacious for the president to spend his State of the Union address insisting that he’s relentlessly focused on the economy and job creation, after his lone reference to the economy in his inaugural address was the declaration “an economic recovery has begun.”

You know, somewhere, just not here.

York:

White House spinners are working furiously in the final 72 hours before President Obama’s State of the Union speech. Their job: Convince the recession-scarred American public that economic recovery is Obama’s top priority — after everything he has said and done to suggest otherwise.

The unemployment rate is 7.9 percent — one tenth of a point higher than it was when Obama took office in January 2009. But the true toll of joblessness is far higher. The Labor Department’s so-called U-6 rate, which includes people who want a job but have become so discouraged they have quit looking, is 14.4 percent. And a new study, by Rutgers University scholars, shows that 23 percent of those surveyed have lost a job sometime in the last four years, while another 11 percent have seen someone in their household lose a job. That is one-third of the American people who have experienced unemployment during Obama’s time in office, along with many more who have experienced other hardships of the economic downturn.

Elsewhere, Byron points out that the president has “pivoted back” to the economy at least six times since taking office.

Actually, back in 2011, the RNC identified at least nine times the White House was telling reporters that their energies would be “pivoting” back to jobs.

When the administration recycles its talking points, you’ll forgive me for recycling my reaction:

Keep in mind that inherent in the pivot-point talking point is an inherent excuse: the reason the administration hasn’t seen much success in bringing down the unemployment rate, or is perceived to be useless in bringing down the unemployment rate, or hasn’t communicated its message about its efforts, is always a lack of time and focus. I think most of us would argue the problem isn’t really an administrative attention deficit disorder or chronic focus on other issues; the problem is the policies stink . . . “Alright, now we’re really going to pivot to jobs, just you wait and see” sounds like the oft-heard pledges of dieting and exercise and saving money and cleaning out the basement and flossing; the idea that all it’s going to take is a bit more attention to the problem and it’s going to be solved.

So, looking at the headlines this morning . . .

Jobless Claims Bounce Higher

U.S. economy contracts for first time since recession

Chinese Cyber Hackers a Growing Threat

U.S. faces new Al Qaeda threat as terror group’s ‘strike map’ is revealed

Report: Iran, Hezbollah terror threat rising

Iran Is Said to Be Set to Accelerate Uranium Enrichment

Syria, Iran threaten retaliation against Israel

And what’s going on at the White House?

Mark Knoller: “Today at the White House: No public events on the president’s schedule today, though Vogue is bringing camera gear into the White House this morning.”

Beautiful day for a photo-op, isn’t it?

The Washington Examiner:

During a Bloomberg News interview this afternoon, President Obama signaled that the American economy was ready to “take off” provided Congress didn’t lead the nation into another fight about the nation’s debt limit. . . .

“I think that businesses are going to be ready to hire, we’re seeing pretty strong consumer confidence despite weaknesses in Europe and even in Asia,” Obama stated. “I think America is poised to take off.”

Looking through the financial section:

Goldman Sachs is projecting a 1 percent growth rate for the U.S. gross domestic product in the fourth quarter.

Corporate profits hit an all-time high, while wages for workers hit an all-time low as a percentage of GDP.

AP:

Citigroup on Wednesday announced plans to cut 11,000 jobs and close branches in a restructuring effort that will result in a fourth-quarter charge of about $1.1 billion.

The housing market:

Nearly two-thirds of the nation’s housing markets will see price declines for the year through next June, according to analytics firm Fiserv (FISV). Overall, the gains will be just 0.3%.

And then the upcoming jobs report . . .

Don’t look to the November jobs report for merry news this Friday.

The highly anticipated report is likely to show a weak month of jobs growth, skewed dramatically by temporary effects from Superstorm Sandy.

Economists surveyed by CNNMoney predict the Labor Department report will show the U.S. economy added only 77,000 jobs in November, a steep drop from the 171,000 jobs created a month earlier.

“Poised to take off” is the new “Recovery Summer.”

From the Tuesday edition of the Morning Jolt:

Astronomical Debt Overshadowed By Geological Age Debate

Hey, news world, let’s analyze Marco Rubio’s comment about the age of the earth for days and days!

. . .  

. . .  eh, let’s not, and say we did, because some really much more important news is going on. How old is the earth? Slightly older than the tradition of the media asking Republicans questions about evolution and Creationism that they never seem to ask any stripe of Democrat.

So, that much more important news that’s going on includes this:

U.S. companies are scaling back investment plans at the fastest pace since the recession, signaling more trouble for the economic recovery.

Half of the nation’s 40 biggest publicly traded corporate spenders have announced plans to curtail capital expenditures this year or next, according to a review by The Wall Street Journal of securities filings and conference calls.

Nationwide, business investment in equipment and software—a measure of economic vitality in the corporate sector—stalled in the third quarter for the first time since early 2009. Corporate investment in new buildings has declined.

At the same time, exports are slowing or falling to such critical markets as China and the euro zone as the global economy downshifts, creating another drag on firms’ expansion plans.

You know those automated “STALL! STALL!” warning voices that pilots hear from the aircraft system? Well, one of those is going off in the Treasury Department.

“In addition to the economic woes overseas they also cited the looming fiscal cliff and coming tax increases,” notes the Lonely Conservative. “Then we have Obamacare and the regulations from Dodd Frank which only make things worse. The left will argue that these companies are just being greedy, but actually they’re being realistic, and if they aren’t investing they won’t be hiring.”

Bruce McQuain:

As before the election, an unstable business climate persists which does not provide any incentive to expand, spend or hire.  In fact, as indicated above, it is providing precisely the opposite incentives.  It’s one reason the GDP forecast for the country has been downgraded again to 1.5% (Mexico, for heaven sake, has GDP growth of 3.2%). But when you vote for the status quo, well, you get what you vote for — enjoy.

Erika Johnsen, at Hot Air:

There’s a distinct lack of optimism about the prospects in a continuing global economic slowdown and the uncertainty of the United States’ pending policy decisions, so companies and investors are going small rather than risking big. If the government manages to navigate us around the fiscal cliff, there may be a short-term burst of pent-up investment energy, but how long can that last? With global governments still trying to solve their massive fiscal problems by Robin-Hooding the wealthy instead of balancing their budgets, how long can any of it last?

“Hopefully, Washington will reach a solution to the (entirely self-inflicted and unnecessary) fiscal cliff problem,” writes Walter Russell Mead. “Hopefully, that will show that fear and uncertainty over the consequences were the real reasons for the collapse. Hopefully, in other words, the roots of the slowing demand aren’t deeper than the foolish political brinkmanship on display in Washington. But, laying aside our hopes for a moment, if, as has happened first in Japan, then the UK, and next the whole eurozone, we were going to have a double dip recession, a collapse in business investment would be one way it would start.”

Over at The Atlantic, Derek Thompson argues the biggest problems are overseas, not at home:

For the moment, imagine two American economies. The Home Economy and the Away Economy. In the Home Economy, there is mostly good news to report, so long as Washington doesn’t screw it up. GDP growth and job growth have been steady, if slow, for more than three years. Consumer spending is healthy. Housing indicators are turning up all over the place, like home prices, home starts, home sales, and construction employment. It adds up to the possibility of accelerating job growth and a recovery worthy of its name in 2013. Small businesses’ sentiment, which relies less on world markets and more on the animal spirits of the neighborhood, is still higher than it was for most of 2011.

Meanwhile, in the Away Economy, there is a world of precarious, scary, and outright depressing news, which is weighing on large corporations that tend to make more than half of their income from customers outside the U.S. GE and Pfizer, for example, are listed in U.S. stock indices. When their prices fall, it looks like a reflection of the U.S. economy. But both companies make more than 50% of their revenue abroad, and Apple makes more than 60% outside the Americas. When the world catches a cold, multinationals sneeze … even if the typical U.S. household is feeling alright.

That strikes me as a particularly cheery take on the domestic picture, but maybe I’m too gloomy . . . 

Over on the home page, I take a look at why Democrats think the economy is currently doing quite well, and why a significant number of independents look at the headlines and think things are going okay as well.

Luckily for the Obama administration, recent economic reports have generated sufficiently unclear results that a casual glance might suggest things are getting better. Few Americans know that, traditionally, the number of new jobs needed each month to keep up with the number of new workers entering the workforce is considered to be 100,000 to 150,000. (Some say a sustained recovery requires something closer to 250,000 jobs created per month.) Obviously, if an economy creates 45,000 jobs, as it did in June, but adds 125,000 new workers, the overall number of people looking for work goes up by 80,000 and the unemployment rate is actually higher, not lower (although the official percentage probably would remain the same, for reasons discussed below).

So some Americans may think that any level of job creation is good news. Saul Alinsky wrote: “The moment one gets into the area of $25 million and above, let alone a billion, the listener is completely out of touch, no longer really interested, because the figures have gone above his experience and almost are meaningless. Millions of Americans do not know how many million dollars make up a billion.”

And few Americans know about the “discouraged worker” factor in the statistics — the factor of the unemployed worker who was looking for work sometime in the past year but has stopped looking for work. The most recent jobs report indicated that there are 844,000 discouraged workers who aren’t counted in the official unemployment rate. The official rate is known as the U-3 figure; adding “marginally attached” workers and then adding “discouraged workers” gives us the U-4 and U-5 figures, respectively. Then there is the question of how to classify those who are working part-time but who want, and cannot find, full-time work. Technically these workers are employed, but they are likely to be struggling financially; there are 8 million Americans in this category; adding these to U-5 brings us to the U-6 figure. Finally, Paul Solman, the business and economics editor for PBS’sNewsHour, believes that the long-term unemployed — those who have stopped looking for a year or more, but say they want a job, a figure reaching about 7 million — should be included, in a figure he labels U-7.

If you include these groups, the number of “unemployed” booms from 12.5 million to 27 million.

In the Tuesday edition of the Morning Jolt . . . sent along to the editors at the usual time, and reaching readers a bit later under our new distribution system (we’re working on it) . . .

A Bold New Form of Media Bias

In light of the Washington Post basing its front-page headline on a survey with an astonishingly small sample and an astonishingly high margin of error, it is good to sum up what we’ve seen from the press in recent weeks.

ONE: For about eight days, the Obama administration told the public that their best assessment of the murder of our ambassador in Libya and three other Americans was that it was the result of a spontaneous protest against a tape mocking Islam on YouTube. This explanation sounded funny from the beginning — even in a place like Benghazi, who brings rocket-propelled grenades and mortars to a protest? — and it seemed surprising that so many in the administration, including U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, seemed to dismiss the idea that a terror attack against American targets on September 11 was a serious possibility. Subsequent reports have revealed astonishingly insufficient security for a site with American lives and American intelligence. The administration’s sustained focus on the YouTube tape seemed to make little sense, outside of a desire to deflect from the continued pervasiveness of anti-American rage in the Middle East and signs of a resurgent al-Qaeda, themes that greatly complicate the argument of the Obama campaign. As of Friday, 17 days after the attack, the FBI had still not reached the consulate site to conduct a forensic investigation.

To their credit, certain places like CNN and ABC News have pursued this story with more vigor than their critics acknowledge.

On a related note, violent protests and threats of violence against American embassies continue, barely mentioned or acknowledged by most venues of the U.S. press. I guess it isn’t newsworthy until someone dies again.

TWO: Univision, a Spanish-language channel, has done an in-depth, detailed, long-form television journalism about the “Fast and Furious” program, showcasing that the violence from the “walked” guns was much worse than previously claimed by the government, and demonstrating the cost in human lives in searing images. (Moe Lane talks a bit about it here.) This report is much more vivid, detailed, and outraged than anything from almost all of the U.S. media, which accepted an inspector general’s report that claimed that repeated warnings and information kept coming up from the field agents but somehow mysteriously never reached the Attorney General. The report claimed that both Acting Deputy Attorney General Grindler and Counsel to the Attorney General and Deputy Chief of Staff Wilkinson were informed about the connection between the firearms found at the scene of fatal shootings and Operation Fast and Furious, but neither believed “the information was sufficiently important to alert the Attorney General about it.”

THREE: With unemployment above 8 percent for forty-four straight months and GDP slowing to 1.25 percent, BuzzFeed declares “one of the central mysteries of 2012” is “How did we stop focusing on the economy?”

FOUR: Day after day, our troops in Afghanistan are targeted and killed by the Afghan troops they are supposed to be training. This barely merits more than periodic brief mentions in the national press. As Walter Russell Mead puts it:

If George W. Bush were president now, and had ordered the surge and was responsible for the strategic decisions taken and not taken in Afghanistan over the last four years, the mainstream press would be rubbing our noses in his miserable failures and inexcusable blunders 24/7. The New York Times and the Washington Post would be treating us to pictures of every fallen soldier. The PBS Newshour would feature nightly post-mortems on “America’s failed strategies in the Afghan War” and every arm-chair strategist in America would be filling the op-ed pages with the brilliant 20/20 hindsight ideas that our pathetic, clueless, failed president was too dumb and too cocky to have had.

Ace of Spades observed something we’re seeing in this cycle that is different even from the hope-and-change euphoria of Obama’s 2008 coverage:

Let me explain why this is different than previous bias.

Previously, the press has been both biased in a partisan way and an in an ideological way, but usually the partisanship was driven by ideology. As you may have noticed, the press are great fans of gay marriage and abortion, and they shape their coverage to put the best possible face on these positions, and the worst possible face on opponents. (To the extent they feature contrary voices at all.)

That’s bias, of course. We’ve gotten used to that.

But in the Benghazi debacle, there is no possible ideological grounding to explain their bias.There is, I trust, no ideological movement that advocates for intelligence failures and the deaths of good-guy diplomats. There is no ideological movement in favor of reckless incompetence bordering on malice in providing security for consulates abroad (which, as a legal matter, are considered US territory).

There is no ideological movement — or at least there was not before — championing the government’s right to lie to the public about its failures in order to avoid accountability.

There is no room here where one can say, “Ah well, they can’t help but be pulled a bit to the left by their own beliefs.” Because no one champions the right of government to let people be murdered and then lie about it.

This isn’t ideological bias, then. This is pure advocacy for a political party. Obama’s embarrassment is not an ideological issue — or should not be. I hope we can all agree that a president should attend security briefings — especially as 9/11 approaches — and provide adequate warning and security for US government personnel. I hope we can all agree that the government does not suddenly gain a Right To Shamelessly Lie about its failures, simply because it finds it politically advantageous to do so.

But, as Nina Totenberg’s chuckle indicates, the press now in fact believes exactly these things — so long as the president we’re talking about is Democrat, and Obama in particular.

Asked how he would grade himself on the economy, Obama answers, “incomplete.”

If you haven’t completed your work by the assigned deadline, it’s a failure, isn’t it?

Say, who gave himself that deadline?

Just as Obamacare required passage “so you can find out what’s in it,” according to Nancy Pelosi, apparently Obama needs a second term to see if he’s able to do it.

Over at Time, Mark Halperin lists eleven ways for Obama to win, and the last one in particular jumped out:

Never deviate from the core message that was set in place even before Romney secured his nomination: Obama can’t win if he can’t swing the conversation away from the economy and render Romney as an out-of-touch plutocrat, an unacceptable alternative in the Oval Office.

I continue to marvel that we have a presidential campaign unfolding in which one candidate is openly trying to keep the “conversation” away from the topic that is far and away the most important priority to most voters. Pick your pollster: Pew Research, ABC News/Washington Post, Reuters/Ipsos, Bloomberg, CBS News/New York Times — every last one of them says the top issue on voters’ minds is the economy and jobs.

This is a de facto admission that Obama cannot win over voters on these issues, and that he cannot win back their confidence and faith on this issue.

We’ve been hearing this all campaign long, but it’s pretty stunning. We can play the “what if Republicans did it?” game, and conclude that an incumbent Republican president who sought to avoid discussion of the voters’ top concern would be endlessly, and deservedly, pilloried, denounced, ridiculed, and mocked.

But here’s the simpler and perhaps more reassuring thought: If you have lost voters’ confidence on their top concern, and your entire strategy is to try to get people to stop conversing about it . . . you’re done. You’ve lost. The only way the economy could be eclipsed as voters’ top concern is some other problem coming up — God forbid, some horrific terror attack or natural disaster or something.

In an article about the allegedly horrific scandal of South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s 14-year-old daughter working in the gift shop of the South Carolina state house, there’s an inadvertently damning indictment of our current economy:

“Even these minimum-wage jobs in this economy can be pretty tough to find,” said Meredith McGehee, policy director for the Washington, D.C.,-based Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan think tank on government issues, including ethics. “While this is probably a small-potatoes case, it creates the appearance of a conflict of interest and strikes me as a politically tone-deaf decision.”

A half-dozen ethics experts and legislators declined to comment on whether the job constituted nepotism when contacted by The State. Most said they did not want to comment because of the involvement of Haley’s child.

For those who care, the governor’s daughter makes $8 per hour, and works 20 to 25 hours per week cleaning and stocking shelves.

So which is the bigger scandal and concern – that the governor’s daughter works part-time in a state job that pays 75 cents per hour above South Carolina’s minimum wage, or the fact that about three years after the recession allegedly ended, minimum wage jobs are tough to find?

As stressful as “You didn’t build that” appears to the for the Obama camp, I think this presidential assertion is going to be more damaging:

Forty-one straight months of unemployment above 8 percent,  8.2 million people working part-time who want full-time work, a record 88 million Americans not in the labor force, 1.9 percent GDP growth in the past quarter, more bad GDP numbers expected tomorrow, a stagnant housing market, $5 trillion in new debt, the downgrading of the U.S. credit rating,  38 percent of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, 45 million Americans on food stamps, food prices continuing to increase dramatically, the poverty level likely to rise to the highest level in nearly fifty years…

… and this means the plan “worked”?!?

Between “the private sector is doing fine,” “you didn’t build that” and “we tried our plan, and it worked,” the president sounds unhinged.

The Morning Jolt begins the week with some ominous news from London about the Olympics, a lengthy contemplation of parenthood and modern society, and then this bit of economic news that could greatly impact the campaign in the fall . . .

Hey, Can We All Get Exemptions from All of Obama’s Policies?

The Wall Street Journal looks ahead . . . to autumn:

For all the focus on the unemployment rate heading into the November elections, the layoffs that could most complicate President Barack Obama’s re-election prospects wouldn’t take effect until early next year.

Unless Congress and the White House reach a compromise by year-end, the Pentagon would have to slash roughly $50 billion more from the current fiscal-year budget in January. That prospect of wide layoffs could undercut Mr. Obama in battleground states heavily dependent on military spending, particularly Virginia.

Federal law requires companies to warn their employees of potential layoffs 60 days before they take effect, meaning thousands of workers could receive the warning notices on the Friday before the election.

I wonder if anyone on Team Obama will contemplate trying to grant some sort of exemption to that federal law. You think I kid, but exemptions are the one of the real currencies of this administration:

On Obamacare the Obama Health Care Tax . . .

Of the 204 new Obamacare waivers President Barack Obama’s administration approved in April, 38 are for fancy eateries, hip nightclubs and decadent hotels in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Northern California district.

On No Child Left Behind . . .

President Barack Obama said on Thursday he was granting 10 U.S. states exemptions from parts of the “No Child Left Behind” education law, a move that could prove popular in an election year with parents and teachers who have criticized the law.

On Iran sanctions . . .

Even as it huffs and puffs, the United States last week took steps to undermine the very sanctions it cites as pressure against Iran. Using a loophole in the law, the administration simply exempted China, Singapore and other countries from heavy financial penalties that might be levied against nations that buy Iranian oil. On June 28, Hillary Clinton announced that the U.S. had “made the determination that two additional countries, China and Singapore, have significantly reduced their volume of crude oil purchases from Iran” and so the law “will not apply to their financial institutions for a potentially renewable period of 180 days.”

That, of course, was a polite fiction. As a July 2 editorial in the Wall Street Journal succinctly summarized the toothless nature of the sanctions law: “It’s so weak, in fact, that all 20 of Iran’s major trading partners are now exempt from them. We’ve arrived at a kind of voodoo version of sanctions. They look real, insofar as Congress forced them into a bill President Obama had to sign in December. The Administration has spoken incantations about their powers. But if you’re a big oil importer in China, India or 18 other major economies, the sanctions are mostly smoke.”

Think of all of these exemptions as after-the-fact admissions that the policies are unworkable and disasters-in-the-making, or a sign that the administration was never that determined to enforce the law in the first place . . .

In light of the jobs and economic numbers out this morning . . .

. . . in jobless claims . . .

Jobless Claims in U.S. Increased by 10,000 to 383,000 Last Week

. . . in job creation . . .

133K new jobs created.

The reading isn’t a disaster, but nothing exciting.

Last month was revised down to 113K from 119K.

The real bad news in the report: The second straight loss for manufacturing jobs.

. . . and revised GDP numbers, from 2.2 percent to 1.9 percent . . .

. . . here’s a second look at my piece from last year on why the media, and many economists, are continually surprised by the slow rate of job creation since 2008:

Groupthink is another possible explanation for why, even after three years, each bit of bad news seems to strike the business-media world as a surprise. One columnist who covers these issues closely observes that many bank economists, such as those at Goldman Sachs and J. P. Morgan, have been similarly optimistic in recent years, only recently slashing their forecasts. “Generally, they’re all using the same model that the White House uses, all built with a lot of these Keynesian assumptions about the impact of government spending, and about multipliers, and so on,” he says. “If you think those multipliers are way too high, then that would explain why they have been overly optimistic.”

In a way, the monthly unemployment report and quarterly economic data are like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. Each month, the administration and its faithful await the new data with optimism and eager anticipation, certain that this will be the month that the long-awaited national hiring spree begins. Each month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics snatches away the football — and after 30 months, many who watch the economy professionally still can’t see it coming.

In December 2010, about a half-hour after new job numbers showed unemployment hitting 9.8 percent, one CNBC anchor closed a segment, “After the break, we’ll have your e-mails about signs of economic recovery,” then he paused and chuckled, motioning to the unseen teleprompter. “Yeah, that was written before 8:30.”

President Obama, yesterday:

And when you’re President, as opposed to the head of a private equity firm, then your job is not simply to maximize profits.  Your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a fair shot.  Your job is to think about those workers who got laid off and how are we paying for their retraining.  Your job is to think about how those communities can start creating new clusters so that they can attract new businesses.  Your job as President is to think about how do we set up a equitable tax system so that everybody is paying their fair share that allows us then to invest in science and technology and infrastructure, all of which are going to help us grow.

And so, if your main argument for how to grow the economy is I knew how to make a lot of money for investors, then you’re missing what this job is about.  It doesn’t mean you weren’t good at private equity, but that’s not what my job is as President.  My job is to take into account everybody, not just some.  My job is to make sure that the country is growing not just now, but 10 years from now and 20 years from now.

1) While the job of the president is not to maximize profits, a president would ideally be attempting to instill within the government some sense of efficiency, cost-effectiveness, budgetary discipline, waste reduction and elimination, and other ways of avoiding runaway spending; with $5 trillion in new debt run up in less than four years, all of these traits have been absent from Obama’s presidency.

We’re not worried about profits, Mr. President. We’re worried about stopping an endless string of catastrophic losses.

2) “Your job is to think about those workers who got laid off and how are we paying for their retraining.” Indeed, Mr. President, and the vast majority of federal retraining programs are expensive, ineffective, and redundant: “A newly released Government Accountability Office (GAO) report exposes a broken web of federal job training and employment programs. Nine federal agencies spent approximately $18 billion annually to administer 47 separate employment and job training programs. Many of the programs are duplicative, but GAO‘s most shocking revelation is that ―little is known about the effectiveness of most programs.”

3) “Your job is to think about how those communities can start creating new clusters so that they can attract new businesses.” But those decisions are best made by local communities, not having the federal government selecting the sites for those clusters with earmarks and preferred companies like Solyndra (which just coincidentally donate a lot of money to your reelection campaign). As Obama’s economic adviser Larry Summers pointed out, the federal government makes a lousy venture capitalist.

4) “My job is to take into account everybody, not just some.” Except that Obama likes to forget about some people, like GM bondholders, the taxpayers who footed the bill for the GSA junkets, Catholic institutions who are forced to violate their principles, competitors of firms that get big contracts after making large donations to the president’s campaign, competitors of firms and institutions that are granted waivers under Obamacare, the coal industry, potential Boeing employees in South Carolina, the privacy of donors to groups that disagree with him…

5) “My job is to make sure that the country is growing not just now, but 10 years from now and 20 years from now.”

Well, the country’s economy is barely growing now, and it has stagnated for the entirety of your term. Unless you would have us celebrate 2.2 percent growth, there’s not much reason to believe your policies will ensure better growth 10 years from now and 20 years from now.

For contrast, in the second quarter of 1983, GDP grew 10.9 percent, third quarter 6.5 percent, fourth quarter 7 percent, first quarter of 1984 7.4 percent, second quarter of 1984 5 percent. That’s what a real recovery looks like; under Obama, we’re still struggling to hit 4 percent quarterly growth.

The Romney campaign sends along:

In case you missed it from this morning, President Obama refused to give himself a grade for his work on the economy during his interview on The View.

In December 2009, President Obama Gave Himself A “Good Solid B Plus” For His Work During His First Eleven Months In Office. “US President Barack Obama, in remarks aired late Sunday, awarded himself a B plus for his first 11 months in office, stressing in an interview with talk show queen Oprah Winfrey that there was still much to be done. ‘A good solid B plus,’ Obama said during an hour-long, intimate soft-focus ABC network Christmas at the White House special, when Winfrey asked what grade he would give himself.” (“Obama Gives Himself B+ For First Months In Office,”AFP, 12/14/09) 

But today, President Obama refused to give an answer altogether. 

·          This Morning On “The View,” President Obama Refused To Give Himself A Letter Grade For His Work On The Economy. 

HASSELBECK: “Mr. President, I believe it was with Matt Lauer in 2009, you sat down, you were talking about the economy and you said in three years I’ll be held accountable. If I don’t have this done, quote, in three years, then  there’s going to be a one-term proposition. Admittedly so in our first segment, you said that Americans are still feeling the hurt of the economy. So how do you grade yourself, honestly, in terms of how you’ve done in terms of economics? 

OBAMA: “You know, I won’t give us a letter grade. I think it’s still incomplete.” (ABC News’ “The View,” 5/15/12)

Ah. A downgrade, it seems. Well, we’ve seen plenty of those during Obama’s presidency.

I do think this is significant in that if Obama thought he could make a credible, plausible, persuasive case that he deserves an “A,” he would have done so. He could even have said, “I’ve accomplished some of the reforms I wanted, but not all, so I’ll give myself a B.”

But with…

• Unemployment at 8.1 percent, and thirty-nine straight months of unemployment at 8 percent or higher;
• Median income down $4,300 since Obama took office and down $2,900 since the “recovery” began;
• Three million foreclosures since 2008, another two million in progress;
• Gasoline costing $3.73 per gallon on average nationally;
• $5 trillion in new debt in less than four years;
• The loss of our AAA credit rating;
• Taxpayers set to lose $15.6 billion if the government sold its GM stock today;
• 71 percent of Americans rating the current economic conditions “poor.”

… Obama can’t really argue for anything more than a “C” at best, and then the headline would be, “Obama Gives Himself a ‘C’ on the Economy.” If Obama had given any letter grade, really, either an unrealistically good grade or a realistically disappionting grade, he would have provided the Romney campaign with days worth of fodder. The only question was whether the message would be “out of touch, rosy-colored glasses, ignoring the 23 million Americans suffering” or “even Obama admits that his economic policies have failed.”

So the president dodges.

He should have just said, “Present.”

Of course, this is precisely the sort of question the president should expect in questioning from now until November.