There was a moment during President Obama's speech at Rutgers on Sunday when he mentioned students who had to work to put themselves through college.

That included me, back when I went to Rutgers in the 1970s. But I lucked out. One summer, I got a job at the Ford factory a few miles up the road in Edison. When school resumed, they let me switch to part-time.

It was great. I could make as much in two shifts at the plant as I could have made working all week at a minimum-wage job.

Alas, Ford shut that plant down 12 years ago. I thought of that later in the speech when the topic turned to trade agreements.

"A lot of folks have legitimate concerns with the way globalization has progressed," Obama said. "That's one of the changes that's been taking place - jobs shipped overseas, trade deals that sometimes put workers and businesses at a disadvantage."

For a second there I thought Donald Trump had stormed the stage and taken over the microphone.

Trump has made Ford a target of his trade tirades because the company is building a new assembly plant in Mexico to build small cars. Guess what we built in Edison? Small cars.

I was still thinking of that the next day when the Democratic legislative leaders held a press conference in Trenton to propose raising New Jersey's minimum wage. They're shooting for $15 an hour.

That might sound good for someone stuck in a low-paying job in our modern service economy. But it adds up to just $600 a week. The guys working next to me at Ford made more than $1,200 a week adjusted for inflation.

That's because they weren't flipping burgers or cleaning hotel rooms. They were producing tangible products of real value.

No one at that press conference was more aware of that disparity than the guy who was leading it, Senate President Steve Sweeney.

Sweeney, who is likely to contend for the Democratic nomination for governor next year, is an ironworker by profession. Ironworking is one field that still pays wages like those earned in the factory jobs that have gone overseas.

They can't export ironworking jobs. Or can they?

"They're doing everything they can," Sweeney told me when I spoke to him later. "They're doing more and more of this thing called 'modular design.'"

That entails assembling big sections of a building overseas and shipping them to a site where the building can be erected - with minimal American labor.

And then there's the Pulaski Skyway. Sweeney noted that it's being rebuilt by the China Construction Corp.

"You can't compete when you have countries that are subsidizing industries and don't have to worry about profits," he said.

That may sound like the Republican Trump, but it also sounds like Democrat Bernie Sanders.

"They're tying into people's anger," Sweeney said of the two. "We're close to a political revolution. People are so dissatisfied."

Well, blue-collar people anyway. And that's a big problem for the Democrats.

Their likely nominee, Hillary Clinton, was guilty of the gaffe of the year when she said in March, "We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business."

She later explained that she intended to help those miners find other work in the renewable-energy field - or in other words that they could switch from mining to installing Chinese-made solar panels on each others' roofs. That comment cost her the West Virginia primary.

Her comment reveals a fault line within the Democratic Party. There are lots of sane environmentalists. But there are also a lot of extremists, like those who fought against Sweeney and other pro-growth Democrats over the extension of a natural-gas supply line to a power plant in Atlantic County.

The pipeline will permit the plant to switch from coal to cleaner-burning natural gas. But the enviros fought it as part of a national movement to shut down fracking.

"I've got a lot of pro-environment credentials, but I don't believe in living in a cave," was how Sweeney put it.

Well put, I'd say. The troglodyte wing of the party is not compatible with the pro-jobs wing. That may be crucial in the fall as Trump tries to wrest the Rust Belt from Clinton.

As for the blue states on the coasts, our white-collar economies are humming along just fine. Obama made that point when he told those Rutgers grads, "You and your fellow graduates are entering the job market with better prospects than any time since 2007."

They are indeed. But when it comes to the kids who didn't go to college, there are lots of fast-food joints and strip malls along Route One. As they make minimum wage, they'll have a great view of the spot where the Ford factory used to stand.