The first president to say the words “full employment” during a State of the Union address was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1939 he argued that it was the government’s responsibility “to attain the full employment of our labor and our capital.” Four years later, in 1943, he went further, arguing that actual freedom, the Four Freedoms that included "freedom from want," required “the right to expect full employment—full employment for themselves and for all able-bodied men and women in America who want to work.” And it was the responsibility of the government to deliver it when the war ended, he said.

The last decade has not been kind to the idea of “full employment.” Unemployment remains higher than anyone believes it should be, while wage growth has been nonexistent for workers who do have jobs. The concept of full employment, once so essential to the liberal project, remains missing from the agenda. Indeed you can see the collapse of the liberal economic project by walking through the use of the term in State of the Union speeches. If President Barack Obama wants to save his failure to end high unemployment in his first term, while also orienting the Democratic party to the future, he should use the State of the Union to resurrect these two words.

Full employment is exactly what it sounds like. As economists Dean Baker and Jared Bernstein show in their recent book, full employment is the point at which additional demand will not create any more jobs. Unemployment is then just a matter of people searching for work in-between jobs. It’s also a period in which workers have significantly strong bargaining power, ensuring that wages increase faster than normal.

Google ngrams show the term’s use coming out of nowhere with the midcentury Keynesian revolution, and then slowly fading from the discussion in the past few decades. A closer look at the evolution of State of the Union speeches in the past 70 years bears this out.