Misty DeMars, an attractive 37-year-old dark blonde woman from a Chicago suburb, played the role of poster girl for extending unemployment benefits at the president’s State of the Union Address. Obama called out Misty from her seat between wife, Michelle, and Joe Biden as the president described her pitiful plight as follows:
“Misty DeMars is a mother of two young boys. She’d been steadily employed since she was a teenager. She put herself through college. She’d never collected unemployment benefits. In May, she and her husband used their life savings to buy their first home. A week later, budget cuts claimed the job she loved. Last month, when their unemployment insurance was cut off, she sat down and wrote me a letter – the kind I get every day. ‘We are the face of the unemployment crisis,’ she wrote. ‘I am not dependent on the government…Our country depends on people like us who build careers, contribute to society…care about our neighbors…I am confident that in time I will find a job…I will pay my taxes, and we will raise our children in their own home in the community we love. Please give us this chance.’”
Misty DeMars, the stylishly-dressed graduate of an elite college living in an upscale Chicago suburb, is Obama’s telling choice of the “face of our unemployment crisis.” A much better choice would have been a high school dropout, who works in a chicken processing plant, drives a 16-wheeler truck, sweats on offshore drilling rigs, works on street repair crews in the heat or cold, or mans a cash register at the convenience store. His or her unemployment rate is three times Misty’s college crowd. The hardscrabble unemployed work under unpleasant conditions to put food on the table, gas in their cars and trucks, and clothe their children. They do not talk, like Misty, of losing a job they “love.”
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