Obama also took questions from a homeless veteran and an Obama impersonator. | Reuters
President Barack Obama on Monday made his first foray into Plus, trying to stay on message during the social media session as he faced an unexpected twist from a woman with an out-of-work engineer husband.
Obama began answering a jobs question from Jennifer Wedel, of Fort Worth, Texas, with a stock answer, telling her, “I don’t know your husband’s specialty, but there’s a huge demand around the country for engineers,” especially in high-tech fields. But Wedel persisted, telling Obama that her husband is a semiconductor engineer.
Continue Reading“I meant what I said, if you send me your husband’s resume, I’d be interested in finding out exactly what’s happening right there,” Obama responded, saying it seems to him based on industry reports that Wedel’s husband “should be able to find something right away.”
“I’ll have to take you up on that,” Wedel said of the president’s offer to help her husband, Darin, who lost his job at Texas Instruments three years ago.
Later, Wedel told POLITICO that she and the president had a “pretty crazy interaction” that she hadn’t expected when she asked about the federal government granting H-1B visas to skilled foreign workers while U.S. citizens such as her husband are out of work.
“I don’t think he was trying to be condescending or anything,” said Wedel, who never completed college and was a stay-at-home mom before her husband was laid off, but now has a full-time job at State Farm to help make ends meet. “I just think I stumped him a little and he wanted me to hush about it.”
“I think he knows pretty well that the H-1B is an issue because — it’s kind of like the Occupy movement — big corporations are putting up the money to get the visas” and choosing lower-paid foreign workers over domestic ones, Wedel said. “I don’t think what he was telling me was true, and I think he knew it, and that’s why he offered to take my husband’s resume,” she said, adding that her husband has kept it updated.
The Republican National Committee quickly seized on Obama’s response, sending multiple email messages about the incident to its mailing lists, including one with a note from communications director Kirsten Kukowski: “A little out of touch?”
Wedel said that she sees Obama as a bit disconnected from economic realities, but he’s not the only one. “The reality is we’re still having a crisis — it’s not over — but the Republicans don’t realize that either,” she said. A longtime Republican who did not vote for Obama in 2008, Wedel said she and her husband for “the first time ever don’t feel like we’re Republicans or Democrats because of the economy.”
She said she’s not drawn to any of the Republicans in the presidential race and might vote for Obama because at least she knows how he’ll handle the presidency. Wedel said she’d be more inclined to vote for him if the White House helps her husband get a job.
During the 45-minute interactive video session, Obama also fielded questions from a homeless veteran skeptical of foreign aid and an Obama impersonator curious to know what the president thinks of the parodies of him.
Though Obama described Plus — the medium he used to chat while viewers watched on the White House website and YouTube — as “some newfangled thing,” this was not his first foray into online question-and-answer sessions. In 2011, he participated in conversations with users of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.