Attempting to distract from his administration’s incompetence in the Gulf and hoping to rewrite the history of the failed $787 billion stimulus legislation, Barack Obama decided to make a trip to Columbus, Ohio, today. The president spoke for just ten minutes at a construction site and was in Ohio for just about an hour.

But he certainly left an impact. And I don’t mean the jobs he claimed to have created through his legislation. I mean the tremendous amount of money his short visit cost both taxpayers and the very construction workers he claimed to be helping.

According to CBS News, his little jaunt left American taxpayers with a bill totaling $500,000 to $1 million. Worse yet, FOX News reports that the construction workers lost a day of pay.

President Obama went to the groundbreaking of a road project in Columbus, Ohio, Friday to show that his massive stimulus package is still churning out jobs — a “good news” story that was anything but for some construction workers who were trying to figure out how to make up for the payday they lost due to the president’s visit.

The workers were told not to report to their construction project at a nearby hospital Friday, because the Secret Service was shutting it down for security reasons. They also were told that they would not get paid for the forced day off.

“We always do our very best to balance the needs of security with the needs and requirements of the venues we’re securing,” Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan said in a written statement of FoxNews.com. “Any interruption in activity that we request is not done arbitrarily and only if absolutely necessary.”

Too bad that meant a day of lost pay for middle class Americans in the midst of a recession Obama has helped to prolong through his reckless policies. (How many private sector jobs were created in May? Just 41,000 while over 300,000 left the workforce.)

“The bosses told us we weren’t working because the president is coming, and we are wondering why,” construction worker George Harrison told WBNS-10TV. “That’s $200 we are missing out on. Everybody needs to eat, right?”

One construction worker told the local TV station that he’s “glad the president’s coming but I sure would like to make that money.”

But what’s the income of the schmuck class matter when the president needs to distract from his many ongoing failures.