Because I have better things to do with my time, I did not watch Barack Obama’s latest pronouncements about jobs.

For one thing, the definition of “news” is in the first three letters of the word, and nothing about Obama’s speech was new, as ABC-TV chronicled:

February 2009: The president tells Congress “now is the time to jumpstart job creation” and his agenda “begins with jobs.”

November 2009: Meeting with his Economic Recovery Advisory Board, the president says his administration “will not rest until we are succeeding in generating the jobs that this economy needs.”

April 2010: Obama goes on a “Main Street” tour, saying “it’s time to rebuild our economy on a new foundation so that we’ve got real and sustained growth.”

June 2010: The president declares a “Recovery Summer” to highlight the jobs created by stimulus-funded infrastructure projects. “If we want to ensure that Americans can compete with any nation in the world, we’re going to have to get serious about our long-term vision for this country and we’re going to have to get serious about our infrastructure,” he said.

December 2010: The president tells reporters “we are past the crisis point in the economy, but we now have to pivot and focus on jobs and growth.”

August 2011: After lawmakers reach a compromise to avert default, the president vows “in the coming months, I’ll continue also to fight for what the American people care most about: new jobs, higher wages and faster economic growth.”

February 2013: At the start of his second term, the president refocuses on job creation in his State of the Union address, saying “a growing economy that creates good, middle-class jobs–that must be the North Star that guides our efforts.”

May 2013: Kicking off his “Jobs and Opportunity Tour,” the president says “all of us have to commit ourselves to doing better than we’re doing now. And all of us have to rally around the single-greatest challenge that we face as a country right now, and that’s reigniting the true engine of economic growth, a rising, thriving middle class.”

The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto read the speech, and declared it “a dreadful, cliché-ridden piece of writing,” highlighting, if you want to call this a highlight:

“Rather than reduce our deficits with a scalpel–by cutting programs we don’t need, fixing ones we do, and making government more efficient–this same group has insisted on leaving in place a meat cleaver called the sequester that has cost jobs, harmed growth, hurt our military, and gutted investments in American education and scientific and medical research that we need to make this country a magnet for good jobs. …

“With an endless parade of distractions, political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball,” the president harrumphed. There’s an image for you. Where exactly is the ball relative to the parade route?

Also, which scandals exactly are “phony”? The biggest scandal is the one that raises serious questions about the legitimacy of Obama’s re-election. Here is what President Asterisk himself had to say on the subject way back on May 13: “If you’ve got the IRS operating in anything less than a neutral and non-partisan way, then that is outrageous, it is contrary to our traditions. And people have to be held accountable, and it’s got to be fixed. . . . I’ve got no patience with it. I will not tolerate it.”

We’re sure his outrage over the phony scandal was genuine.

More from today’s speech: “Now, if a good job and a good education have always been key stepping stones into the middle class, a home of your own has been the clearest expression of middle-class security. . . . Finally, as we work to strengthen these cornerstones of middle-class security, I’m going to make the case for why we need to rebuild ladders of opportunity for all those Americans still trapped in poverty.”

Which are they, cornerstones or stepping stones? And how to you rebuild a cornerstone anyway? A colleague remarks that “a cornerstone is just a rock,” though perhaps he’s taking it for granite.

For all the president’s talk about equality, he seems to have very rigid ideas about class distinctions. Strengthened cornerstones are only for the middle class. Poor people are stuck with rebuilt ladders. What a grim and dour view of America this president has. In real life, even slum housing generally has staircases or elevators.

Then there’s this: “We’ve got more than 100,000 bridges that are old enough to qualify for Medicare.” If bridges are enrolling in Medicare, it’s no wonder health-care costs keep rising. …

From today’s speech: “Of course, we’ll keep pressing on other key priorities, like reducing gun violence, rebalancing our fight against al Qaeda, combating climate change, and standing up for civil rights and women’s rights.”

On the other hand, Obama’s certitude about his own superiority, his utter contempt for his political adversaries, even for those whose priorities differ from his–now that’s genuine. It is the central feature of his political character, and the proximate cause of–pardon the cliché–Washington’s current “dysfunction.”

This is the president presiding over an economy in which 47 percent of American adults have full-time jobs. Not even half. More than 14 percent of American workers fit in the U6 category of unemployed, underemployed, or no longer seeking work. The Obama-administration annual economic growth of 0.9 percent is a bit off the historical yearly average of 3.3 percent.

The Wall Street Journal also observed:

We counted four mentions of “growth” but “inequality” got five. This goes a long way to explaining why Mr. Obama is still bemoaning the state of the economy five years into his Presidency.

The President summed up his economic priorities close to the top of his hour-long address. “This growing inequality isn’t just morally wrong; it’s bad economics,” he told his Galesburg, Illinois audience. “When middle-class families have less to spend, businesses have fewer customers. When wealth concentrates at the very top, it can inflate unstable bubbles that threaten the economy. When the rungs on the ladder of opportunity grow farther apart, it undermines the very essence of this country.”

Then the heart of the matter: “That’s why reversing these trends must be Washington’s highest priority. It’s certainly my highest priority.”

Which is the problem. For four and a half years, Mr. Obama has focused his policies on reducing inequality rather than increasing growth. The predictable result has been more inequality and less growth. As even Mr. Obama conceded in his speech, the rich have done well in the last few years thanks to a rising stock market, but the middle class and poor have not. The President called his speech “A Better Bargain for the Middle Class,” but no President has done worse by the middle class in modern times. …

The official excuse is that recoveries coming out of recessions caused by financial crises are always slow. But then why have we been told every few months for five years that faster growth would soon be coming? Perhaps readers recall former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s famous 2010 op-ed, “Welcome to the Recovery.” Mr. Obama wants it both ways: Take credit for recovering from recession, but blame that recession ad infinitum for the slow pace of the recovery.

What about the middle class that is the focus of Mr. Obama’s rhetoric? Each month the consultants at Sentier Research crunch the numbers from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey and estimate the trend in median annual household income adjusted for inflation. In its May 2013 report, Sentier put the figure at $51,500, essentially unchanged from $51,671 a year earlier.

And that’s the good news. The bad news is that median real household income is $2,718, or 5%, lower than the $54,218 median in June 2009 when the recession officially ended. Median incomes typically fall during recessions. But the striking fact of the Obama economy is that median real household income has fallen even during the recovery.

The core problem has been Mr. Obama’s focus on spreading the wealth rather than creating it. ObamaCare will soon hook more Americans on government subsidies, but its mandates and taxes have hurt job creation, especially at small businesses. Mr. Obama’s record tax increases have grabbed a bigger chunk of affluent incomes, but they created uncertainty for business throughout 2012 and have dampened growth so far this year. …

Mr. Obama would have done far better by the poor, the middle class and the wealthy if he had focused on growing the economy first. The difference between the Obama 2% recovery and the Reagan-Clinton 3%-4% growth rates is rising incomes for nearly everybody.

House Republicans have put a check on Mr. Obama’s most destructive economic policies, but the President could do more to help growth if he crossed party lines to pass tax reform the way Reagan did in his second term, or to work out a budget deal as Bill Clinton did in his fifth year.

Mr. Obama’s only pro-growth proposal is immigration reform, and we’re not sure he wants even that to pass. Judging by the partisan tenor of his Wednesday speech, he may be setting it up to use as a campaign wedge in 2014. If only Mr. Obama understood that before a government can redistribute wealth, the private economy has to create it.

A real recovery does not take place when one-seventh of the workforce isn’t working enough. A real recovery doesn’t take place when less than half of Americans have full-time jobs. (That may be unprecedented in American history.) Economic growth doesn’t take place when a country has the world’s highest corporate income tax rates. A real recovery doesn’t take place with a president who would prefer that the economy crater instead of giving up on his socialist, wealth-hating, job creator-hating ideals.