Lately the Obama campaign and its allies have been emphasizing Obama’s efforts as an organizer to rescue laid-off steelworkers on the far South Side of Chicago, perhaps even to bring the steel jobs back to the city. The odd thing is that, of all the things Obama did, that was the biggest failure, and the one that most clearly indicated how little Obama and his fellow organizers understood the conditions that had led to the workers’ unemployment. From my story:

The long-term goal was to retrain workers in order to restore manufacturing jobs in the area; [organizer Jerry Kellman] took Obama by the rusted-out, closed-down Wisconsin Steel plant for a firsthand look. But the whole thing was a bit of a pipe dream, as the leaders soon discovered. “The idea was to interview these people and look at education, transferable skills, so that we could refer them to other industries,” [Obama colleague] Loretta Augustine-Herron told me as we drove by the site of the old factory, now completely torn down. “Well, they had no transferable skills. I remember interviewing one man who ran a steel-straightening machine. It straightened steel bars or something. I said, well, what did you do? And he told me he pushed a button, and the rods came in, and he pushed a button and it straightened them, and he pushed a button and it sent them somewhere else. That’s all he did. And he made big bucks doing it.”
That, of course, was one of the reasons the steel mill closed. And it became clear that neither Obama nor Kellman nor anyone else was going to change the direction of the steel industry and its unions in the United States. Somewhere along the line, everyone realized that those jobs wouldn’t be coming back.