On a day when President Barack Obama is expected to face a poor report on July unemployment, he’s scheduled to appear at the old Navy Yard in Washington, D.C. to showcase his administration’s job programs.
Obama will use his 11 a.m. speech “to discuss the Administration’s efforts to prepare our nation’s veterans for the workforce,” according to the White House.
Images of the president talking about jobs programs will help soften political anxieties resulting from a jobs report due out at 8:30 a.m.
Economic analysts expect poor performance, but nothing terrible enough to nudge the nation’s unemployment rate above June’s 9.2 percent showing.
The nation’s labor force increases by roughly 150,000 each month as young people and new immigrants replace retirees. Economists say the U.S. economy must create 200,000 new jobs per month in order to bring down the unemployment rate.
On July 8, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that total employment rose by only 18,000 in June, the president traveled to Northern Virginia Community College’s Alexandria Campus to deliver a speech which the White House said covered “the importance of training and preparing our workforce to compete for manufacturing jobs across our country.”
The resulting footage was used as background video in many TV reports describing the terrible job creation numbers. (RELATED: White House on worst market drop since 2008: ‘Markets go up and down’)
For White House officials concerned about key economic indicators, video of the president helping to train workers is preferable to images of Obama celebrating his birthday on Thursday.
Those worker-training videos are also preferable to the images anticipated in the afternoon. That’s when the president is slated to walk past ranks of cameras on the South Lawn of the White House, where he will board a helicopter and leave town for his quiet retreat at Camp David.
