Obama In Pittsburgh

President Obama made an appearance in Pittsburgh last Friday. He traveled there to kick off a public-private partnership intended to promote the application of innovative technologies for use in manufacturing. It's nice that the President used the trip to remind everyone that innovation is not confined to the East and West Coasts. As for its effect politically, I think that the partnership will be a wash. Supporters will say that at least he is trying to do something to help with jobs in manufacturing. Opponents will say that he is doing it the wrong way.

As a supporter, I am perturbed by the part of his speech where President Obama cited Andrew Carnegie. For one thing, there is the incongruity of using Carnegie's role^* in the early development of the steel industry as the vision for an Advanced Manufacturing Partnership. The more important problem was Obama's pronounciation of the name. He used the New York pronunciation, CAR-nuh-Gee, instead of the way almost every voter in Southwest Pennsylvania says it, Car-NEIGH-gee. It's like making an effort to be seen in Philadelphia ordering a cheesesteak, then asking for it with Swiss cheese. And this was not the first visit to Pittsburgh. Getting legislation passed may be hard, but it isn't that hard to make an effort to connect with the local flavor. I hope that The President and his staff will do a better job of connecting with the voters he will need next year.

^*Before Carnegie built his own steel mill, he resisted the use of steel components in his iron bridges. His bridge engineers insisted that some steel parts were necessary for safety, but Carnegie then saw steel only as an extra cost that cut into profit. Carnegie did not invent the Bessemer process. He saw the innovative process applied successfully on a large scale in England, then scaled it up even more for his new mill in Pittsburgh. He made the huge capital investment only because he calculated that he could sell a high volume of a superior product for little additional production cost (analogous to China's big foot in global manufacturing). Carnegie was known to criticize innovations by his competitors, suggesting to customers that his competitors' products were dangerous. Then after his competitors went bankrupt he adopted those very same money-saving processes. Carnegie today would echo Senator Casey in criticizing the administration's trade policy.