President Obama in Mount Holly (or, The Fainting Economy)

MOUNT HOLLY -- The woman had waited for President Obama too long.

The workers invited to see the president here at the Daimler truck plant got herded in early because of security. They’d been standing around a couple of hours. It was warm inside the plant. And so, partway through the president’s speech, she fell out.

“It looks like somebody might have fainted up here,” Obama said, calling for the EMTs. He rescued it with a laugh line: “Folks do this all the time in my meetings.”

The woman was fine. It was just hard to wait so long like that.

Hold that thought.

The president came to Mount Holly to tout clean energy. The Freightliner trucks made at the plant made a nice backdrop, seeing as how some of them are built to burn cleaner and cheaper natural gas.

But this is an election year, so it was also a campaign stop, and Obama had fun with it. He teased the Freightliner employee who introduced him for sounding like a preacher. He joked about his tie having Carolina blue and the Duke shade, too. He said he loves North Carolina: “Even the folks who don’t vote for me, they’re nice to me. They usually wave five fingers.”

He acted loose and confident. With good reason.

Over on the Republican side, primary voters keep trying to run the whole campaign off a cliff like in one of those Indiana Jones chase scenes. Mitt Romney won Super Tuesday, sort of, but he still can’t shed Rick Santorum, who is running one of the finest political campaigns of the 1950s. And Newt Gingrich won Georgia, even though in a general election he couldn’t beat Gen. Sherman.

All those polls you see about Obama being unpopular? They’re true – until you put him next to one of the Republicans. Then he looks like Reagan vs. Mondale.

But there’s a real weak spot – Obama knows it, his opponents know it, and voters know it. It’s the same weak spot you see in the story of this sparkling plant building these massive trucks.

Underneath, the economy is unstable.

One of the reasons Obama came to Mount Holly was so he could mention that the Freightliner plant added more than 1,000 workers last year. Daimler also announced in January that it’s hiring 1,100 people at its plant in Cleveland in Rowan County. That’s all great news.

But back in 2009, the company laid off more than 2,600 workers at those two plants and one in Gastonia. Many of the new hires are workers who got laid off three years ago and are now coming back.

Alan Herrin’s story is a little different. Herrin, who’s 50, was one of the workers who got an invitation to hear Obama speak. He’s been with Freightliner for eight months. He used to work for a company that helped make the doors for Freightliner trucks. What happened to that job?

“Mexico,” he says.

At Freightliner, Herrin inspects trucks as they come down the line to make sure they’re put together correctly. He’s on his feet or under a truck eight hours a day. When I ask him what he uses for a crawler, he smiles and says “these,” pointing to his knees.

But he’s glad to have the job. Freightliner feels like a family to him.

“I hope I’m here ‘til I’m 75,” he says. “But who knows these days?”

Who Knows These Days? could be the theme of this campaign. The unemployment rate is dropping, but millions of people are still without work. The housing market is rebounding a little, but neighborhoods are still dotted with foreclosures.

President Obama can make a case that the economy is growing again after a deep recession. He can also tick off a list of other accomplishments – he saved the car companies, passed a health-care plan, got rid of Osama. But when you’ve been laid off or furloughed or had your pay cut or lost your benefits, none of that other stuff matters so much.

To extend that image from way up at the beginning, people can only wait so long for things to get stable. Then they start dropping out.

It’s March; lots of weird stuff can happen between now and November. (This time four years ago, candidate Obama had just been trounced in Ohio by Hillary Clinton.) But right now, no GOP candidate looks to be much of a match for the president.

Unless the economy dives downward again. There’s no telling what people will do when they start to feel faint.

Steven Slater , taking the slide

Of course the best way to start this Steven Slater story is the Taiwanese animated re-enactment. For many more Slater updates, check here (some NSFW language, it probably goes without saying).

Steven Slater is a hero. The JetBlue flight attendant acted out the fantasy of millions of working people. He told off the jerk who had cussed him out, then he quit his job in style -- in his case, by grabbing a beer, popping the emergency slide on the plane, and gliding off to freedom. Take this job and shove it, I ain't working here no more.

Steven Slater is a jackass. He overreacted to a rude passenger, made it all about himself, got arrested, and became instantly unemployable anywhere except for reality TV.

Steven Slater is a symbol -- a symbol of disgruntled workers, a symbol of our in-your-face society, a symbol of the everyday torture that comes with riding the airlines, and working for one.

To me, more than anything, Steven Slater is a warning. Because he did the kind of work most people will end up doing in this country. He wasn't a maker, he was a server. And not everybody is cut out to serve.

You know the score, but here's a couple of details. According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Carolinas lost 460,000 manufacturing jobs between June 2000 and June of this year. Over the same period, the Carolinas gained more than 93,000 jobs in the leisure and hospitality field.

That's a lot fewer working in mills and factories, and a lot more people working at customer service desks.

That's not a knock on service jobs -- my mama was a waitress for 20 years. It's just reality. People are doing different kinds of work in different settings that require different attitudes.

Here's the main difference. If you work in a manufacturing plant, you have one or two bosses. You might grumble about them -- everybody grumbles about the boss -- but you probably learn to deal with it.

In a service job, you have those bosses, too. But the real bosses are your customers -- hundreds of them, maybe thousands. And in a group that big, somebody's bound to set you off.

Steven Slater didn't flip out at a supervisor. He flipped out at a passenger who had been involved in a preflight dispute about the overhead bin. There are several versions of the story, but two parts are consistent: Slater took a shot to the head when he tried to break it up, and after the flight landed, when he approached the woman, she four-lettered him.

No doubt it was a bad scene. But lots of service workers put up with worse, every day, and hold their tongues.

The customer is not always right, and lots of times the customer is flat-out wrong. Customers leave popcorn boxes on the floor of the theater. Customers stiff waiters making $2 an hour. Customers return pants they've worn 10 times. Customers do all sorts of crazy things, and then rant when they don't get immediate satisfaction.

A professional in the service business has to take that junk, swallow it, and figure out a way to make the customer happy. Most customers are good ones, and if all you do is focus on the bad ones, you'll drive yourself crazy. Which Steven Slater, at least temporarily, did.

Steven Slater isn't a hero or a jackass. He's an ordinary American worker who was faced with what's becoming a more and more ordinary situation.

What happened makes you wish that, when we're in customer mode, we have a little more appreciation for the people on the other side.

And it makes you hope that, when somebody feels the need to pop the emergency slide, we can provide the kind of job that's a good place to land.