Unemployment is persisting at 9%. The argument between the media economists bounces between the economy stayng where it is or going into a “double dip”- another couple of quarters of zero or negative growth.

The Fed has run out of bullets with interest rate manipulation. The latest round of bond purchases (Quantitative Easing) ended at Noon today. QE2 did a good job weakening the dollar and putting a boost into the stock market, but it was a blunt instrument, and it also fed the commodities markets, which added at least twenty five cents a gallon to your gas purchases. If you are a union household with a full pension in the offing, you made out better. If you are not, and trying to eke out your own retirement, you didn’t.

Obama’s fallback on all this is to get on the pulpit and talk about all he has done, and all the unappreciating masses will get in line and party like it’s 2008.

This is a man who is still convinced that his open mouth heals all wounds. He is the one who remarked that 2010 would not be another Clintonian Republican rout, because this time, “the Democrats have me”.

So there he was, after his vacations, golf weekends and fundraisers, lecturing the Republicans on leadership. Then he took after the evil hordes lurking about- “millionaires and billionaires”. “Hedge fund managers”. “Oil company executives”. “Corporate jet owners”. That is the union base talking: the money to solve the government crisis is out there, we just need to get up the gumtion to get together and take it!’’

And the pool of people out there listening to this drivel is shrinking, as evidenced by his polls taking roost in the mid to low 40’s. Look what happened to Busgh in 2006- his numbers, driven by immigration, federal spending ans war issues slipped into the 30’s and cleared a path for Speaker Pelosi.

What you are starting to see is panic mode. He set some hefty expectations for himself with his mouth a few years ago, and his base is starting to see his limitations.

They will still vote for him next year, as if they would suddenly see a kinship with the likes of Romney, Perry or Bachmann. But if he wants to take the borderline states that carried him over the top in 2008, he will need that extra 10% to do the grunt work and carry the independent vote into victory. There are six or seven states that he barely carried then, including North Carolina- where they are holding their convention.

And when the commentators on MSNBC miss an open mike and get caught out there likening you to the subject of a Viagra commercial, you have some serious problems.

Listening to Obama speak publicly isn’t enough by itself anymore. I always feel like I’m missing something. As in, he couldn’t have said…that. Did I skip a paragraph? Did I fall asleep?

So now it is a few days, in between life’s crude interruptions. Download the transcript. Make sure it is a trusty source. Go over it sentence by sentence. Then I can see if my shoot from the hip WTF reactions have any basis.

This was all supposed to be a speech on Afghanistan. That’s not where it ended, though. It ended as a political campaign polemic on the economy. I won’t go into the economy here, that would end up being another book.

Where can I start? Oh, yeah: this is our strategy for “ending” the war. Not winding it down, but ending it. Clausewitz reality moment number one, Barrack: if you want to announce an “end” to the world, one can hope that you are at a victory. Absent that, why the hell continue to fight it? But I guess, as candidate Obama said so profoundly in 2008, “They’re only words”.

Second: where is any mention of the Generals that you conferred with (hopefully) before your decision? Does Dave Petraeus even exist any more? The last I remember he and the CentCom people musing about the counterinsurgency they were asking for troops for, this was all a process that was likely to drag out into 2014. Did they revise their plans? I know that all the public statements from the Joint Chiefs on this invoke one level or another of disappointment, followed by a ‘we’ll do the bestwe can’ yes man suffix. They don’t sound like hearts and minds have been won. But, as Obama the candidate said repeatedly, “I set the mission”. His Chicago military experience and his Ivy League war college training trump all that, I guess.

This is where one of Obama’s argumentive traits jumps in- the eternal strawman. In this case, the alternative presented to his decision was a chase for making “Afghanistan a perfect place”- a picture I struggle to watch General Petraeus paint with his mouth.

Then there is the bulls**t doublespeak: withdrawing 30,000 troops by next September will allow us to “fully recover the surge”. Withdrawal is now “recovering”? I obviously need an updated Roget’s. My bad.

All this leads to a heartfelt focus on the economy, which he obviously plans to highlight in his re-election campaign by talking about until we’re so tired of hearing him that we will all forget that unemployment is more than double pre-recession levels for almost three years now.

“It is time to focus on nation building here at home now”. Notwithstanding the crude segue, I guess the Constitutional Law Professor is doing a rewrite, it is now ‘providing for the common defense OR promoting the general welfare’. I’m just trying to keep up.

The idea that the gap between rich and poor is increasing is a popular one now, and is at the heart
of many policy proposals to correct it.

In the meantime, only workers possessing the new skills could take advantage of the new technology and make a living out of it. Over a few decades, the dispossessed either were left behind completely or made out the best they   could in what they were doing. The next generation grew up adjusting to the new world and closed this gap when
they entered the workforce, coming of age with the needed skills just when the technology was becoming the largest part of the economy. The rich became not as rich as the poor had more access to the new jobs, and the gap closed.

The same thing is happening now. The billionaires that led the way into the computer age have done their work, and there are others out there now, expanding the efforts of pioneers like Bill Gates and bringing what used to be the tools of the few and leaving it to anyone who can operate a personal computer.

As with the maturation of the Industrial Revolution, the rich will stop accumulating wealth as fast, and the new generations of workers will enter the labor force with a comfortability with the new jobs, just when they are expanding into almost every aspect of our lives. The entry level workers will make close the gap from the bottom up.

This is a cyclical process, and there isn’t much that government policy can do to change it, or change it’s speed.

The baseline that is beingused to show the increasing gap is deceptive. It is the state of average pay at the end of the post World War II expansion.

At the end of that war, almost half the economic activity on the entire planet took place within our borders. Our trade with the rest of the world as they rebuilt provided a basis for the United States expanding at an average rate of 7% a year for a quarter century, until it was cut off by the first OPEC oil embargo. We have only had
one year (1984) since that came even close to that.

Because of this expansion, the career paths of the WWII veterans allowed generosity in pay increases that we have also not seen since then, at least not on a wide scale. That expansio came closer to creating a true middle class than anything the world has ever seen. Comparing our income gap now to that makes it look much worse than it
really is.

The gap that came with the new age of computers, along with it shrinking when that technology matures, is cyclical and expected. The expansion that started in 1945 was an aberration.