Identity of Romney's Phila. job seeker still unknown

Amid the jabs and jibes of the highly charged presidential debate Tuesday night, Mitt Romney fast-fueled a Philadelphia-area mystery when he referenced a recent college graduate who could not find full-time work.

Who is the unnamed Generation Y woman whose story was profound enough to rate a mention from the Republican presidential nominee?

As of Wednesday night, it wasn't clear.

Officials of the Romney campaign were called, e-mailed, and generally bothered for comment, but none could provide a name.

One staffer suggested politely that there were more important things to worry 20 days before the election.

Perhaps. But it has become a commonplace of modern politics for a candidate to pepper his or her utterances with tales of real people - their worries, tempests, and triumphs used to lend grit and credibility to the usual declamations.

Romney mentioned the woman's plight early in Tuesday night's town-hall-style debate on Long Island, when a young man asked the candidates about a generation unable to launch careers.

"Your question is one that's being asked by college kids all over this country," Romney said, according to the debate's official transcript.

He continued: "I was in Pennsylvania with someone who had just graduated - this was Philadelphia - and she said, 'I've got my degree. I can't find a job. I've got three part-time jobs. They're just barely enough to pay for my food and pay for an apartment. I can't begin to pay back my student loans.' "

It's a common enough tale for the millennial generation (age 18 to 34), as Generation Y is sometimes called. Since 2010, just 54 percent of young adults in the age range of 18 to 24 have been employed - the lowest level since 1948, when the government began keeping track, according to the Pew Research Center.

A survey found that only half of recent college graduates were in jobs that require a college education, according to Carl Van Horn, director of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

So where did Romney meet the struggling graduate? A local campaign aide who asked not to be identified suggested she might have been at Valley Forge Military Academy and College in Wayne for his Sept. 28 rally.

"We're going to take Pennsylvania," Romney promised that day.

Did his confident rhetoric inspire the woman to tell her story? If so, news reports of the day don't mention it. Several people who attended didn't remember such a person.

Earlier that day, Romney attended a fund-raiser at the Union League of Philadelphia. Could the anonymous graduate have been a waitress? No way, a person with the league said.

The former Massachusetts governor's bus tour stopped June 16 near Quakertown, where he said a few words and bought a meatball hoagie with pickles and sweet peppers at a Wawa, but reporters there, too, did not remember such a woman. Neither did people at Romney's May 24 visit to Universal Bluford Charter School in West Philadelphia, where he discussed education.

"He didn't meet a woman there," said Devon Allen, a school spokesman. "It was a closed session, and all the employees he met worked at the school."

Besides, Allen said, if there were an underemployed college graduate connected to the school, its chief funder, music mogul Kenny Gamble, "would have reached out to her."

Campaign aides said Wednesday they would keep trying to identify her.