Chilly reception on Pennsylvania job trip

WSJ:

When President Barack Obama launches a multicity tour Friday to take Main Street's temperature, he will likely get a cool reception from business leaders and workers here who say he hasn't delivered.

Swing voters in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley helped Mr. Obama win this pivotal, populous state. But the region's jobless rate inched up another half percentage point in October to 9.8%. About 41,000 people are out of work, the highest number since 1984.

Small businesses that power the economy here are starved for credit and laying people off. Stimulus dollars for roads, bridges, schools and social services are mired in Washington and state bureaucracy.

"In the last two or three months people are getting disillusioned," says Allentown Mayor Ed Pawlowski, a Democrat. "If he's kicking off this tour and nothing of substance comes out of it, it's gonna kill him," Mr. Pawlowski says.

Equipped with a history, even a pop song, enshrining its hard times, Allentown and the Lehigh Valley have struggled to rebuild their economy since steel mills closed in the 1980s. Public-private partnerships and state and local tax holidays have replaced an abandoned department store with an $80 million corporate headquarters for PPL Electric Utilities Corp. The Mack Truck plant, shuttered in 2008, will soon house a 1,000-worker branch of the Lehigh Valley Health Network facility, now the city's biggest employer.

This spring, a $740 million casino opened where the Bethlehem Steel mill once employed 35,000 people, symbolizing the region's painful transition from heavy manufacturing to a mostly service economy. Now, says Mr. Pawlowski, businesses with fewer than 50 employees make up nearly 13,000 of the valley's 14,000 employers.

During Mr. Obama's daylong visit, he will hold a town-hall meeting at Lehigh Carbon Community College, visit a local diner and a metalworks plant, and mingle with workers at a dog-food distribution plant.

Allentown was selected to kick off Mr. Obama's jobs tour because it "has a long history of rebirth during challenging economic times, and like many other parts of the country the city is figuring out how to invest in areas of innovation," says White House deputy press secretary Jennifer Psaki.

...

Having a long history of having to go through rebirths does not strike me as a great recommendation. It is too bad that Obama opposes jobs in carbon based energy, because they could really add to the Pennsylvania economy with thousands of jobs in drilling and producing from the shale gas deposits under Pennsylvania and other states stretching up through New York.

These are jobs that would not cost the federal government money and would actually provide revenue to the government through increased royalty and tax receipts.