The Missing Page in the State of the Union

There’s an infamous anecdote about President Bill Clinton’s 1993 State of the Union. While delivering the address to Congress, a young White House staffer accidently loaded an older version of the speech into President Clinton’s teleprompter.

Recognizing that he was seeing an older draft, Clinton went on an improvised, seven-minute riff that covered the miscue until the correct text was found and loaded. It made for a tense seven minutes for the President’s staff. But Clinton’s delivery was so skillful, the public never noticed.

What if that glitch happened again? What if an entire page simply went missing during President Obama’s most recent State of the Union. And what if it came right after he delivered this paragraph:

During the Great Depression, America built the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge. After World War II, we connected our states with a system of highways. Democratic and Republican administrations invested in great projects that benefited everybody, from the workers who built them to the businesses that still use them today.

What would that missing page have looked like? Here’s what I and millions of other jobless Americans wished had been there:

Let us agree that those massive public works were the legacy left to this generation of Americans. And let us also agree that our generation has yet to meet our bipartisan obligation to posterity.

For the last three years, we have sought to end the jobs crisis in America. We have saved jobs. We have created jobs. But we haven’t seen the sustained employment growth needed to fully overcome this crisis.

I say “we” because at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue – and along Constitutional Avenue at the Federal Reserve – men and women of both political parties have tried to address this crisis.

But we need to keep trying, because this nation is still 18 million jobs shy of full employment.

To the unemployed and underemployed, the recession and jobless recovery has been an unmitigated disaster. They lost their incomes. Many lost their homes and savings. And slowly but surely, they lost their self-confidence.

As the bills piled up, they felt themselves sliding down the economic ladder. As rung after rung broke beneath them, their hold on their middle class dreams grew weaker. And they became frustrated at their government’s inability to rescue them.

After sending out hundreds of resumes, getting no responses, turning to family and friends for help, living on loans they could not repay, exhausting unemployment and resorting to food stamps, they still retained an absolute determination to work again.

Tough times make for tougher people. And the millions of Americans who have suffered through this recession and jobless recovery are some of the toughest, most talented, most competitive people on the planet. All they want is a chance to prove it.

And we will give them that chance.

Tonight, I am signing an Executive Order that requires each member of the cabinet to contribute ten percent of their discretionary funds to a federal pool that will finance the new Works Progress Administration.

Tomorrow, I will send legislation to Congress authorizing the creation of a temporary agency,  set to sunset in five years, that will hire jobless Americans to work on local public works projects.

The programs will improve basic infrastructure, modernize our schools and health care system, and upgrade our manufacturing plants and transportation facilities.

These new Work Progress projects will be locally inspired and organized. They will spend 85 percent of their budgets on salaries and wages. And they will be engaged in work that lasts, work that future generations will use, and work that all Americans can point to with pride.

That missing page would have challenged Congress and the American people. It wasn’t only a missing page. Its absence was a missed opportunity that cannot be replicated.

And that’s a damn shame!