Wow, an hour of Michelle Obama on C-Span on being scared and struggling. No mention of her Magnet Program high school or her scholarships & subsidized loans for college and grad school and Baracks for prep school on up - except to complain about paying off these loans. Let me get this straight - Barack went back to Harvard Law School, graduated in 1991, simultaneously was a State Senator, a lecturer at U Chicago Law School, Chairman of an educational board and on another one, and an associate attorney and probably made a few pennies on the first printings of his first book. Somehow that income should have added up, and the 2nd fact that most people with loans know is they're not worth paying back early because they're subsidized so they're cheap loans compared to say mortgages. And he finished paying them back after 10 years. Should we be sympathetic?

Oh wait, she just called Obama becoming a "Constitutional Law Scholar" - I thought he was a lecturer, not a research professor. She talks about Obama's mother growing up in Kansas (no, she left earlier, she moved around until they settled in Hawaii). Ann was on foodstamps when she went back to grad school - while presumably living with her parents (her mother was a bank VP, father by that time a store manager), while her son was going to prep school partially on scholarship, and of course Ann was still married. Let's just say that maybe it wasn't so "tough" as it was convenient - God Bless America for easing the lives of people trying to do something different, trying to get ahead, no? Could Michelle try saying that one time?

Now she's onto his grandma in Kenya, his time in Indonesia - had forgotten that was still in the stump speech.

Now she's back to fear, "the fear of what might happen if you do something different, change is hard..." Now we're back on struggle, "no you can't, it's not your time". "We're not supposed to be here, we're not supposed to dream".  Well, no, that's what all that educational support is about, all those foodstamps and welfare aid is about, all that inner city support that even paid Obama's salary when he went to Chicago to canvas and organize. Let's look at some of the supporters of Obama's Developing Communities Project for one:

Developing Communities Project, Inc. wishes to say "thanks" for their support over the years.

• Catholic Campaign For Human Development
• Chicago Capacity Building Initiative
• Chicago Community Trust
• Chicago Foundation for Women
• Girl's Best Friend Foundation
• Illinois Department of Human Services
• Mayer & Morris Kaplan Family Foundation
• Polk Bros. Foundation
• Tribune Charities
• Wieboldt Foundation
• Woods Fund of Chicago
• US Bank

What a nice combination of private and public, corporate and religious organizations that got together to help people of the inner city have better choices. God Bless America. Somebody better get Michelle on message, because the divisive thing may work for the Democratic contest, but it sure won't work for the generals.

Just as a reminder of the various inane drivel that has driven this election cycle, remember the all-important concern that Chelsea won't give press interviews. I don't know why this problem that affects our national security and life as we know it dropped off the radar, so I'll raise it again: Why won't she talk? Our democracy depends on it!

Bob Somersby at Daily Howler gets into this and other issues - like how Hillary got beaten up for the flag burning bill - which it turns out was a pressure relief to give Dems some cover from an actual flag burning bill that would actually make it illegal. And Obama voted for Hillary's bill. But the slams have worked against Hillary. No problem, it's politics as usual.

But just take away the reality that both sides have played these tricks from the beginning. It's how politics works. Every 4 years someone says they want to talk about issues, but it's not just issues that win an election. We know it both as political junkies and as voters. We have relationships with candidates, we want to feel invested in them, we want their personality, not just their position paper. Whenever we want to bomb someone, we start portraying them as Hitler, and then we start discussing the piddling details of the sins they've committed. Politics is similar. Find ways to make your opponent look terrible - a liar, a panderer, off the wall, inconsistent, weak on facts and issues. The simple truth will never do, even if you're completely in the right. Political points have to be packaged right or they can be used back against you.

Of course you don't do this in a vacuum. Earlier we had the press. Now we have the press plus the blogosphere. Knowing how to get this combination right is deathly important. There's more critique on spin these days, but it doesn't have to be 100% rugged, just good enough for the markets you target. And best if it doesn't get reversed to become a punchline.

Unfortunately in the exit polls, I still don't see that Chelsea not talking to the press was one of the big reasons for people's vote. We'll have to do better next time.

I've been meaning to get back to this ever since say my first post back January? February? (TPM archives lost, what to say...), but thank Phoenix Woman over at FireDogLake for giving the perfect segue for me: <a href="http://firedoglake.com/2008/05/03/come-saturday-morning-the-silver-lining-thats-green/">Youngstown</a>

For some time now there's been a great moan rising over the land because of the loss of our manufacturing base. (I think that's how Michael Moore became well known back in Roger & Me times). And yet it never seems to strike people that we kept creating jobs. Then in the early 2000's, gloom and doom over computer outsourcing, but if you look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics pages on job predictions,  computer-related jobs are projected to be some of the biggest winners over the next 10 years, along with the health field.

Should we be worried? Well, yes and no. First, as the Youngstown article gets at is that you don't just turn around cities and ways of life instantly, and it's not always clear how to manage the transformation. (Someone suggested not long ago that a tube factory be turned into an LCD factory - not exactly the simplest, cheapest conversion). But in terms of loss of jobs, no, not really as long as we're maintaining quality job growth, which we more or less are, and as long as we're not sacrificing strategically important industry knowledge, which in some ways we are. Those I'll discuss in a moment.

But in terms of money, offshoring is a great bargain. From a $20 Barbie, 35 cents stays in China and the rest reverts back home. The money saved goes to investors and to consumers who presumably pay lower prices, and for every dollar off the price tag, that's $1.50 or $2 of earned income if you consider taxes. So the downward pressure on prices has been huge. If we hadn't squandered our savings on Iraq and other wastes we might notice it.

Now much of the profits on the Barbie goes to the marketing chain - one of the underappreciated jobs in the world, perhaps up there with lawyering in terms of respect, but aside from creating sometimes annoying ads and a few worthy of YouTube, marketing also helps tailor products for customers - end consumers or corporate consumers. And as long as the US manages to do a good job of managing the processes of China to tailor products for the rest of the world, and continues to own the processes if not the factories themselves, this is a huge bargain.

But if you talk about the service industry, Americans think you're talking shake machines. Actually shake machines are manufacturing, just on a JIT basis, and that's why they pay so poorly - if we could, we could export these jobs to China too (and some enterprising guys have outsourced the drivethru window to call centers to let the local staff focus on shakes and burgers). And while there was a lot of creativity in developing our manufacturing base, including factory designs and planning, the labor inside the plant provides little value-add beyond a particular point. And so it becomes a prime candidate for outsourcing. If America's to be on top of the economic heap, it has to be providing products and services of better quality and ingenuity than elsewhere, and if this process can be broken up into more efficient pieces, it should be - this is what led to the creation of the assembly line and other production enhancements. You can have a Dell Computer that basically makes nothing, only assembles from different providers and handles marketing - an excellent business prototype, but anathema to those who value old-style manufacturing. And anathema to those who see manufacturing as one of the corner-stones of liberal values, unions, and may I say Marxist scripture. It's a class issue as much as a jobs or economics, and there's just not the Bruce Springsteen glamour of Pittsburgh as a finance or marketing or computer town as it is as a steel town. Not that I know of anyone aspiring to sweat 10-12 hours a day in a steel mill, but somehow we know they're out there in scores.

In terms of the economic transitions, offshoring and the whole manufacturing shift has been poorly handled, planned and explained, and of course the people at home have real lives to adapt and real cities to adjust to the new life - whether downsizing and beautifying the city, as Youngstown did, while some people move elsewhere, and unfortunately government has not been on the ball as it should be to assist with this needed and wanted transition. Yes, wanted. We're continually upgrading our economy for a better model, but instead of controlling this like a typical controlled economy, we need features that help us adjust, including portable health care and practical job retraining programs and other ways to make it easier for industry and business to upgrade. America has a huge job churn each year - in 2005, 40% of workers switched jobs! 55 million jobs lost, 57 million jobs gained! Now there are good sides to this job dynamism, and bad sides. The personal disruption has little to say for it, but people like job advancement and moving up wages - which we now know happens more through transfers than promotions. Companies are able to tailor their workforces, though in the end they prefer much less than a 40% turnover to keep business running smoothly. So dealing with this reality and taking the unwanted pain out of the job churn should be highest priority.

Of course people tend to believe that the job churn means jobs going to China and India. But it typically means jobs going down the street or to another state. During the great 2003 offshoring computer scare, the BLS showed a ton of computer programming jobs lost - and slightly more computer analyst jobs created. Perhaps the shift from "programmer" to "analyst" was the value-add part, maybe field-specific knowledge combined with computers to give a leg up on foreign competitors.

Of course there will always be local content, not just Hollywood entertainment and gaming industry and music, but also just having a local cultural flavor and intuition to a service whether computers or fashion. As long as the particular product or service is not too generic to sustain a cost difference, it can stay local. But it has to compete with foreign products as well, just as high class couture has to compete with WalMart bargains. It's just a matter of finding a successful niche. Which is part of marketing.

Now what would be nice is if people in our government not only understood these pressures and movements, but could also create reasonable programs to assist the transitions in helpful and not destructive ways (both for people and in an economics sense). And the best would be someone able to actually communicate what is happening so that Americans don't maintain a relatively distorted view of the transition happening right now. Youngstown seems to get it - manufacturing isn't coming back, large populations aren't coming back, but we can create good jobs, have a good lifestyle, and come up with a new design. Perhaps we'll think of the Midwest as the new model in the near future.

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