Chicago Tribune has a terrific editorial Sunday, headlined “American Anxiety,” exploring the great contradiction of the Obama years — the fact that Americans fail to feel the progress that statistics suggest we’re making. The “American psyche,” it reckons, is “still reeling from the Great Recession.” On Wednesday, the Tribune notes, the Federal Reserve “is expected to raise interest rates, which have been kept near zero for seven years. It’s about time.”

What is so striking about this editorial is that it comes out of Chicago, where the Federal Reserve chairman, Janet Yellen, made her first big demarche. This was her notorious jobs speech, delivered in March of 2014. The speech was memorable for, among other things, the fact that the Fed chairman mentioned three working Americans by name and telephoned them before delivering her remarks. Yet she offered noting but bromides, more Fed-speak.

Tribune doesn’t mention this speech in its latest editorial, but it is a devastating reprise nonetheless. It concedes that the “top-line numbers on the economy do sound excellent.” It notes “six straight years of growth, with unemployment down to 5 percent,” which it deems “a proxy rate for full employment.” It also notes the creation of 13 million jobs and a stock market that has nearly tripled and low inflation.

“Unfortunately,” the Tribune writes, “that’s not the end of it: The growth is unimpressive, stuck at about 2.25 percent per year. The unemployment rate is low in part because so many Americans have dropped out of the workforce. Many other workers have gone a long time without a decent raise. Those numbers show wages finally seem to be rising again, but it’s tentative movement, too soon to tell if it sticks and not enough to delight Americans.”

The Tribune contrasts Mrs. Yellen’s reassurances with a poll that finds 72% of respondents think we’re still in recession; another that nearly half of the millennial population thinks the American dream is dead; and a finding that the percentage of Americans who think of themselves as middle class is plunging. Could President Obama’s hometown paper endorse the Fed Oversight Reform and Modernization Act, which passed the House and is now before the Senate?