President’s idea to get out of Washington is a good one

It’s always nice to have a president come to town, especially when he’s here to talk about a positive development, as President Barack Obama was Tuesday when he visited V&M Star in Youngstown.

The president was touting the $650 million expansion at V&M Star’s pipe-making plant, which brought the national media to Youngstown to report on an upbeat story. That in itself was an improvement over what has become a depressingly familiar parade of national reporters coming here for Rust Belt stories and footage of urban decay along the banks of the Mahoning River.

He used the Valley’s most recent success as an example of how the administration’s economic stimulus plan is working and praised the area congressional delegation for voting for the stimulus bill. Noting that stimulus money helped fund about $20 million in road and railroad improvements adjacent to the plant, he said: “So as a result of this investment, V&M Star’s parent company decided to invest $650 million of its own money — its own money — to build a new one-million-square-foot mill right here in Youngstown ...”

And that was the one and only time the president mentioned V&M, though he said “GM” five times during his 20-minute speech.

The pecking order

He recognized congressmen, mayors the governor and the Ohio secretary of state by name, But he never said the name of V&M Star’s parent company, Vallourec, nor did he acknowledge during the speech Joel Mastervich, V&M’s president and CEO, or Philippe Crouzet, chairman of the management board of Vallourec, who was visiting from Paris.

This may sound like nitpicking, but it presents a point worth pondering. When a president is more assiduous in patting his administration, his congressional allies and other political brethren on the back for creating jobs than the company that is creating the jobs, two explanations come to mind.

One is that a White House speech writer is guilty of a damning oversight.

The other is that the president and his administration don’t fully appreciate where most jobs come from — companies and their investors. Sometimes those jobs are created with government help, and sometimes they’re created in spite of government interference. In any case, the risk takers deserve more than a passing mention.

Don’t inflate a nudge

We acknowledge that the government may have nudged V&M Star by committing to improve site access. The degree to which the project hinged on that help is open to interpretation, but it certainly didn’t hurt to be able to assure V&M that road and rail work would be done.

Realistically, though, if the government could get the kind of return on its stimulus dollar that V&M Star represents — for $20 million invested, someone else invests $650 million, creating 400 temporary construction jobs and 350 long-term manufacturing jobs — the recession would be over. The $1 trillion stimulus package would have leveraged $32 trillion in private investment and created at least 17 million full-time jobs and even more temporary jobs.

Let’s just say that whatever the success of the stimulus may turn out to be, its numbers will fall well short of those marks. The president said it was good to be back in the Mahoning Valley, and he noted that it is easy to get jaded in Washington, where “everybody is spending all their time arguing about politics and you lose track of the folks who sent you there in the first place.” He said he’s getting out of town about once a week, “just to talk to folks who are working in various parts of our economy and to find out what’s going on in communities.”

That’s fine. If there’s a message the president should take back to Washington from his visit to Youngstown, it would be that we were happy to see him, and he is welcome anytime. But he may want to rework his equation for emerging from the recession so that management and capital are given at least as much weight as labor and government.