One year ago, Washington shored up Wall Street, Chrysler and General Motors. Yet, the $77 billion Detroit bailout has proved to be wide of the mark.

President Obama missed the opportunity to repower the entire U.S. economy by ramping up the industrial Midwest. We’re still paying the price.

Allen County’s unemployment rate reached 10.7 percent in January. Throughout the state, the number of employees in government has exceeded the number of employees in manufacturing – 442,800 in government, 430,800 in manufacturing. This is historic. Manufacturing has been bigger than government since the Civil War and probably before.

Detroit’s bailout actually scaled back an industrial base already in the process of shrinking. One-third of Indiana’s industrial jobs vanished in the last decade – 240,000 manufacturing positions. Many of these jobs will not soon return.

In a time when many believe the United States can maintain its economic might and standard of living on ingenuity and high technology alone, the industrial center of the country has been reduced to an afterthought, even a cliché. That’s dangerous thinking. High-tech alone can’t sustain us.

“We have a tendency to think manufacturing is 20th century if not 19th century,” said labor professor Harley Shaiken of the University of California, Berkeley. “But manufacturing is at the heart of any largely advanced economy in the world. China, Germany and Japan understand that. We, I think, have ignored it.”

Deindustrializaiton haunts the Midwest. While the White House green-car initiatives were tied to better fuel economy and less tailpipe emissions, they were not tied to regirding the Midwest for economic success. General Motors, for example, linked with South Korea’s LG Chemical for lithium-ion batteries, and Ford linked with France’s Saft. Those links may well keep the intellectual center of crucial battery technology in Asia and Europe, rather than Detroit, where the downsizing has hollowed out research and development. “They just don’t have the ability to do R&D anymore” in Detroit for green technology, said Kenneth Baker, the retired head of GM R&D.

It’s little wonder why the Midwest is adrift. Washington itself is part of the problem. Liberal social critic Lewis Lapham, former editor of Harper’s magazine, has condemned the entire political structure of Washington. He described Republicans and Democrats alike as a single political class, abetting “the transformation of democracy into something more closely resembling a plutocracy. … It seems like politics has just been reduced to trivial entertainment. So long as we could buy an SUV or a condo in Florida, what the hell difference did it make who was running the country?”

Lapham wrote this in 2003. Seven years later, it still appears true. What we need is a commitment from our political class. Industrial tax credits, investment strategies, foreign trade adjustments and a refocus on engineering and science must emanate from Washington.

And there has to be an agreement from Wall Street. Its relentless buyouts and focus on quarterly earnings have denuded the industrial Midwest and shipped jobs abroad. “Our financial mess is a result of a mind-set focused on shareholder return. But this mind-set failed us,” said Clyde Prestowitz Jr., president of the Economic Strategy Institute, a Washington think tank. “It’s brought us a catastrophe.”

Washington can’t simply cut taxes or keep launching stimulus packages to revive the economy. So much of what we buy is made abroad that a resumption of consumer spending is not going to make a big dent in the jobless rate.

What we’ll finally realize, Prestowitz said, is that we must manufacture our way back to prosperity. Appearing on public television’s “News Hour” with Jim Lehrer the day before Christmas 2008, Prestowitz pointed out: “The only way for the U.S. to achieve sustainable, long-term growth is for the U.S. to produce more here, export more, relatively, while Asia imports more relatively.”