Just a bit more than a year ago, young Emma Carmichael, a nice young person from Vermont, unwittingly became the subject of a much-used news photo: at her graduation from Vassar, a little hungover and a lot bored, someone snapped her picture and then it got licensed to a bazillion news stories about how there were no jobs for new graduates. "We were all destined for unemployment and my face seemed to say it best," she wrote here a year ago: "Hungover and under-prepared, but I could fake contemplation and self-awareness with the best of them."

Well, Barack Obama promised the young people that everything would work [...]