We’ve commented before on President Obama’s off the cuff advice to people who seek his help during public meetings—there was, for example, the farmer who was worried about the effect of increasing regulations.
President Obama dismissed his worries as exaggerated if not completely unfounded and advised the farmer to just ring up the USDA for the real skinny (yeah, right).
More recently, Mr. Obama learned in a live chat with Jennifer Wedel that her engineer husband was having a hard time finding a job after being laid off. The president asked for Mr. Wedel's resume!
He seemed very upbeat about Mr. Wedel's prospects:
During the live video chat on Google Plus, which had been set up as part of the White House’s focus on social media, Obama told Wedel that he believed such high-tech fields are in great demand and her 40-year-old husband ‘should be able to find something right away’.
Two months later, the Wedels have learned that finding a job for Mr. Wedel in this economy has proven as hard as getting a live person to answer the phone at the USDA. Darin remains unemployed:
“Not even recruiting companies are calling anymore,” said Jennifer Wedel, the Fort Worth mother of two who chatted online this year with Obama about her out-of-work husband.
She says his job search has been hurt by a program to hire skilled foreign workers.
It’s been more than three years since Darin Wedel lost his job as a semiconductor engineer at Texas Instruments. …
“I did feel we got our hopes up a little,” Jennifer Wedel said last week. “I mean, he’s the POTUS. But it seems not even the leader of our country can get [Darin] a job.”
The Washington Free Beacon headlines a story on the plight of the Wedels “Not Even POTUS Could Find This Engineer a Job.”
As much as I love the Beacon, I disagree. Better policies which created a better economy would likely find Mr. Wedel a job.