The U.S.’s June jobless report is in, and the numbers aren’t great. The economy added 83,000 jobs, up from May’s numbers but nowhere close to the far broader gains in March. Every outlet is afire with the news, spinning it this way and that, and even President Obama stopped to give his own spin on the way to Senator Robert Byrd’s memorial.

Flanked by his labor action team, the President told Americans to look on the bright side, highlighting certain accomplishments and trying to make it seem as though June’s meager unemployment drop from 9.7 to 9.5 percent was another one. That’s like telling a dangerously bleeding-out patient they should be thrilled the rate of bloodflow has slowed by .3 percentage points.

There’s little doubt that the U.S. economy, limping as it is, is in better shape in Barack Obama’s hands than it would have been under the inconceivable McCain/Palin administration.

But the Democrats were supposed to have long since woken up to the public anger shown at special elections this year and finally, loudly begun a focus on jobs and job creation, the most pressing concern for a great majority of voters. They have yet to do so, and now the conservatives get to gleefully sing that Congress has gone on summer vacation while average people cannot make ends meet.

Americans care about a lot of things, and sure, we’ll get riled up over taxes and guns and religion and wars as is our national heritage, but above all Americans care about working. It’s built into us and our social structure and character; we are all promised that we can succeed if we try hard enough, that every door is open and any ladder climbable. Americans are made to think that the vast riches of their fellows might one day be theirs, and that’s the idea that keeps us all-out from social revolution.

But we need to work first. We need the first rung of a ladder to grab hold of. And the Obama Administration needed to start taking pages from F.D.R.’s playbook, not the Clinton-era cautioners around him. There needed to be bold moves for jobs creation, innovative, wide-spread plans, radical nation-building projects.
Our infrastructure is crumbling and our railroads are shameful to compare to other countries; our bridges are in danger, our water supplies are unsafe. A huge nation-building initiative should have been the first announcement out of the White House gate. Why it was not is inconceivable, and why it has not come to fruition even more so. But Obama still has some time left. We elected a president who seemed to embody the American dream of ever-upward mobility for a reason.

Yet the weak-kneed Democrats have again let the Republicans set the dialogue, so that Obama is castigated for spending to save the economy, and damned at the same time for not spending more and broadly in jobs creation. All of our politicians dawdled for months in D.C. with health-care banter and ramping up unnecessary, brutal wars abroad, so that it still seems like the only place still enthusiastically hiring is the Army.

The media is happily dealing into the blame game without anyone saying what needs to be said: that very real Americans are suffering badly, and not enough has been done to help them, and to give them ways to participate in building up their country’s future. When there are no more opportunities to feed your children, when the bills mount, when benefits dry up, when hopelessness becomes despair — this is not the Manifest Destiny we were taught to expect at school. So the country grows increasingly desperate and angry, and every single person in Washington and the state level is responsible for not responding to the people’s primary need.

Smart politicians by now should know their history: keep us working, or we’ll take your jobs away, too.