A Scary Reality

By BOB HERBERT

Last week was a pretty good one for President Obama. Bill Clinton helped out big time when he returned from North Korea with the American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee. Sonia Sotomayor was elevated to the Supreme Court. And Friday’s unemployment report registered a tiny downward tick in the jobless rate.

But for American workers peering anxiously through their family portholes, the economic ship is still sinking. You can put whatever kind of gloss you want on last week’s jobs numbers, but the truth is that while they may have been a bit better than most economists were expecting, they were still bad, bad, bad.