A revelation in the White House

The White House public relations team went into high gear, back during the 1992 presidential campaign, asserting the way the story was reported was “almost wholly untrue.”

Nonetheless, incumbent President George H.W. Bush — who for years as CIA director and then vice president had lived cut off, behind a cordon of servants and bodyguards — already was fighting accusations he was out of touch with the common man when things went terribly awry at a “photo opportunity” at a Florida grocers’ convention

Apparently astounded by the bar-code scanner and signature security pad being exhibited, the first President Bush remarked he was “amazed with the technology.”

Unfortunately, voters knew such scanners had been used in American supermarkets since about 1976. In fact, the devices were so widespread by 1992 that, fair or not, the impression of “Bush 41” as a member of an out-of-touch elite — a man who apparently had not stood in line in an actual grocery store for decades — was cemented in the public mind.

So some are wondering why major news outlets appear to be giving a pass to our current president over what appears to be a similarly “Did he just say that?” moment.

On NBC’s “Today” show Tuesday, President Barack Obama appeared to ascribe part of the blame for the nation’s current high unemployment rate to the arrival on the scene of such new technologies as … the automated teller machine.

“There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers,” Mr. Obama said. “You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller. Or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.”

Wow. Wait till he hears about the self-service gas pump!

In fact, contrary to the president’s assertion that ATMs contribute to stubborn unemployment, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicted bank teller jobs would actually grow about 6 percent from 2008 to 2016.

And National Review’s Jonah Goldberg points out that, “At the dawn of the self-service banking age in 1985 … the United States had 60,000 automated teller machines and 485,000 bank tellers. In 2002, the United States had 352,000 ATMs — and 527,000 bank tellers.”

But the question isn’t simply whether statistics prove the president was wrong about the vanishing bank tellers. Rather, as with President Bush’s supermarket moment in 1992, some wonder whether it’s possible President Obama — who outside of “community organizing” appears never to have held a job in any private-sector company — can really be so clueless about the way businesses struggle to hold down payroll costs in a heavily taxed and regulated economy that “the ATM theory” could have seemed to him a fresh and urgent realization.

It increasingly appears the current administration hasn’t a clue what helps or hinders the private sector in growing and creating jobs. If the most elementary revelations about those calculations leave them as agog as schoolchildren shouting “Gee whiz!” is it any wonder he’s presiding over one of the weakest economic recoveries in the nation’s history?