The White House announced on Wednesday that government agencies will speed their payments to the small businesses they contract with, cutting the allowed payment period from 30 to 15 days.
But President Obama didn’t mention that when he stumped for small businesses in Raleigh, N.C. Instead, he focused on the small-business benefits laid out in the American Jobs Act he sent to Congress earlier this week.
Obama told an audience gathered at North Carolina State University that his proposal would benefit 7,000 small-business owners in North Carolina alone.
The president was talking to business owners like Irv Portman, a Democratic commissioner in Raleigh’s Wake County, and owner of WestStar Precision. Portman gave the president a tour of his plant, which builds airplane parts out of scrap aluminum, in Apex, N.C., before Obama headed down the road to deliver his address in Raleigh.
But corporations who employ much of Wake County’s booming technocrats were left out of the conversation. GlaxoSmithKline, Cisco Systems, IBM, and 170 more global companies have offices in Research Triangle Park, a Southeastern Silicon Valley that stretches along a section of I-40 known as “tobacco road” for the industry it replaced.
Research Triangle Park has kept North Carolina’s second-largest county’s unemployment rate relatively low, at 8.2 percent, compared with the state’s largest county, Mecklenburg, where bank layoffs in Charlotte have driven unemployment up to 11.1 percent.
One of the first companies to find fortune in the Triangle, the analytic-software company SAS founded in 1976, is far from qualifying for small-business tax breaks. The U.S. Small Business Administration defines small businesses in the service sector as those bringing in no more than $21.5 million annually. Under that definition, the last time SAS qualified as a small business was in 1982. In 2010, SAS’s revenue reached $2.43 billion.
The president, glowing with energy and dripping with sweat, told the audience that if Republicans are serious about helping job creators, they should look no further than small-business owners.
“It comes down to what our priorities are,” Obama said in his speech. “Do we want tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires?” The crowd roared, “No.”
Yet SAS exemplifies the employer-employee relationship Obama lauds in his jobs speeches. Fortune Magazine rated SAS No. 1 among its list of 100 best companies to work for in 2011 and 2010. SAS employs 4,773 people in its headquarters in Cary, N.C., and 12,226 nationwide.
And they have local resources, not tax breaks, to thank for it.
“SAS has thrived in Cary, and the Triangle area of North Carolina, for 35 years because it is a hotbed of innovation and a magnet for highly skilled talent,” claimed Don McCorquodale, director of state government affairs for SAS. “The world-class universities, concentration of technology expertise in Research Triangle Park, and an affordable standard of living give us an advantage over other companies looking to hire in high-demand fields like data analytics.”
Those world-class universities may have led the president to Raleigh for the same reason he spoke in Columbus, Ohio, and Richmond, Va.: Obama is using his popularity in college towns as cushion to address swing states. In 2008, Wake County voted for Obama over McCain 76.5 percent to 21.62 percent, while the rest of the state turned only a pale Tarheel blue, 49.9 percent to 49.5 percent.
Where Obama will push his jobs plan next remains to be announced, but if the first three stops are any indication of the strategy, it is bound to be a city in a swing state with a highly educated, low-unemployement, pro-Obama population. Whether or not the area’s residents will directly benefit from the jobs proposal may factor in more lightly.
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