It’s not the birth certificate, stupid. (It’s jobs.)

Yesterday the government released numbers that show first-quarter GDP at
only 1.8 percent and jobless claims had risen for the third week in a
row above 400,000.

America faces a jobs emergency, but nobody in Washington gives any
evidence of giving a damn. Nobody talks about jobs. Nobody proposes jobs
programs. Nobody fights for jobs. The debate is now between
Democrats who do nothing to fight for jobs and Republicans whose budget
would destroy jobs.

I agree with Karen Finney
that there is an element of racism in the birther mania, and I have
accused Donald Trump of running a campaign for birthers and bigots.
But there is a far, far more important issue of jobs that lies at the
heart of our discontent.

There are virtually no Republicans who talk like Jack Kemp, who offered conservative ideas to promote jobs for blacks and whites, and few Democrats who talk like Robert Kennedy.

Robert Kennedy had it right, and if Barack Obama understood RFK, which he does not, the panorama of national politics would be quite different today. What Bobby tried to do was unite white working-class voters, black voters, Hispanic voters and all voters behind their common aspiration to a better life.

At his recent town hall at Facebook the president listed his three major urgent priorities of unfinished business as president. He did not mention jobs. He repeated his list twice. He did not mention jobs either time.

I will guarantee that if Robert Kennedy had been president for two and a half years and was asked that question, he would have been passionate and aggressive about the unfinished business of creating jobs for America, jobs for whites, jobs for blacks, jobs for Hispanics, jobs for Americans.

I will guarantee that if Jack Kemp had been president for two and a half years, he would have spoken passionately and aggressively about the unfinished business of creating jobs for whites, blacks, Hispanics and all Americans.

RFK would have talked about the outrageous income disparities in America, which have gotten worse under Bush, and worse under Obama, and there is nothing pending in Congress to address this.

RFK and Jack Kemp would have talked about a jobless recovery violating our principles as a nation. They would have talked about what Robert Reich calls a “a wageless recovery” that is turning America into a nation of millions of jobs exported out of the country, while too many of the modest new jobs created being at burger-flipper wages, with declining benefits, while Americans are strangled by the punishing prices of food and gasoline.

As for me, I am going to make jobs my No. 1 issue in the next year, as I have for several years, obviously with little impact in a city that has abandoned any pretense of caring about, or fighting for, jobs.

And while I will advocate legislation to create jobs and oppose legislation that destroys jobs I am also about to begin a major effort to propose a movement of Americans to support American companies, and American workers, to create American jobs.

If every American would buy one more product made in America the impact would be enormous in creating jobs, improving morale, strengthening the economy and lifting the nation.

The ideas, measures and projects I will soon be proposing in my “American jobs for America” project will find support from the Tea Party right to the progressive left and everyone in between.

I would like to unite the AFL-CIO worker in Ohio with the Tea Party worker in Texas with the small-business people of the nation. I would like to unite the Hollywood stars and the inner-city poor and the factory workers of America behind a campaign that no power on earth can stop: Americans buying American.

For this purpose I have been talking to a range of groups, firms and people behind the scenes about this. People will be amazed at the wide and almost universal support a “buy American to help America” campaign will attract.

And yes, I have talked to some media friends about this. I will not only talk to people I know at MSNBC, and send this to Al Gore and Keith Olbermann, and CNN. I will also talk to Fox News because Fox, too, should support an Americans for American workers, American companies and American jobs movement.

I am fed up to the gills with the garbage that is now called our political debates.

It is time to kick some butt, wave some flag and create some red, white and blue American jobs.