The fair-haired boy of the Times’ financial coverage, Andrew Ross Sorkin, scored a big interview with President Obama that was the cover of the Sunday Magazine yesterday. (Oh boy, he got onto Air Force One. He tells us that a lot.)
But more substantively, the piece reviews many of the major decisions Obama made regarding the big rescue of the economy in the 2008-2009 crisis, the rescue of the auto industry, Dodd-Frank, the Affordable Health Care Act, and other macroeconomic decisions. I agree that, on balance, Obama did many positive things.
But what irks me is that Sorkin essentially makes fun of the administration’s efforts to spur new technologies. The government gave incentives to a French company, Saft, to build a lithium ion battery plant in Florida. It has not yet turned a profit. It doesn’t employ that many people. Therefore Sorkin suggests the administration’s technology policy is a failure.
The truth is that the government has played, and can play, an enormous role in creating jobs based on technological innovation and commercialization. I’ve written about this subject repeatedly and in depth in “The Next American Economy: Blueprint For a Real Recovery.”
Sorkin also says that, in truth, an American president might not be able to have much impact on the economy. That is utter rot. The power an American president has to shape R&D spending, job training and retraining, export promotion, infrastructure, and all the other elements of a savvy economic strategy are very much in place. Obama tried to use some of them, as with Solyndra, but ran into such a partisan storm that he backed off.
Which leads me to the things that Sorkin did not discuss with Obama–he never, not once, talked about national technology strategies, the importance of creating successful export and go-global strategies for American companies, or the budding movement to “reshore” millions of jobs that went to China and elsewhere. There’s only one reference to an issue that may be the central challenge of our era–how to train and retrain American workers to be able to take the types of jobs that American companies are creating.
So as in the case of Eduardo Porter, Sorkin floats at the very top of the food chain and talks to a lot of important people. But he never demonstrates that he understands what is happening at the grassroots level of the economy. He got on Air Force One alright, but he never glimpsed the real challenges that millions of Americans are wrestling with.
