President Barack Obama on Monday made his first foray into Google Plus, trying to stay on message during the social media session as he faced an unexpected twist from a woman with an out-of-work engineer husband.
Obama began answering a jobs question from Jennifer Wedel, of Fort Worth, Texas, with a stock answer, telling her, “I don’t know your husband’s specialty, but there’s a huge demand around the country for engineers,” especially in high-tech fields.
But Wedel persisted, telling Obama that her husband is a semiconductor engineer.
“I meant what I said, if you send me your husband’s resume, I’d be interested in finding out exactly what’s happening right there,” Obama responded, saying it seems to him based on industry reports that Wedel’s husband “should be able to find something right away.”
“I’ll have to take you up on that,” Wedel said of the president’s offer to help her husband, Darin, who lost his job at Texas Instruments three years ago.
Later, Wedel told POLITICO that she and the president had a “pretty crazy interaction” that she hadn’t expected when she asked about the federal government granting H-1B visas to skilled foreign workers while U.S. citizens such as her husband are out of work.
“I don’t think he was trying to be condescending or anything,” said Wedel ...“I just think I stumped him a little and he wanted me to hush about it.”
“I think he knows pretty well that the H-1B is an issue because — it’s kind of like the Occupy movement — big corporations are putting up the money to get the visas” and choosing lower-paid foreign workers over domestic ones, Wedel said.
“I don’t think what he was telling me was true, and I think he knew it, and that’s why he offered to take my husband’s resume,” she said...
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/72185.html#ixzz1l2hbsXxZ
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