Less than a month after taking the oath of office, President Obama stood on a windy construction site in Northern Virginia and promised that his landmark $787 billion economic recovery stimulus program would “create or save almost 100,000 jobs in Virginia, doing work at sites just like this one. Where we’re standing, that could mean hundreds of construction jobs.” Thanks in great part to the surge of employment his program would create, especially in the road and construction industries, Obama said unemployment would not exceed 7.8 percent nationally and up to 3.6 million jobs would be “created or saved.”

Today nearly a year later, unemployment stands at 10 percent. The actual total is closer to 17 percent when you include people who gave up after months of fruitlessly searching for work. The Obama stimulus program has become the butt of jokes on late-night talk shows, thanks to revelations by this newspaper and others of the phantom nature of more than 100,000 of the 640,000 positions claimed by Obama to have been created or saved, as well as revelations about jobs saved or created in congressional districts and ZIP odes that don’t exist.