If you’re John Kerry, and you’re considering how best to criticize the Bush presidency, it’s easy to consider your rival’s record a “target-rich environment.” In fact, it’s a little too easy.
Part of a successful campaign is a focused message. If Kerry is going to critique Bush’s job performance, he can’t very well “swing for the fences” on every possible area of public policy. It’s not that Bush doesn’t deserve it, only that the message would be diluted in a garbled mess.
So, what are Bush’s biggest liabilities? At the top of the list has to be his abysmal record on job creation and unemployment.
As the LA Times Ron Brownstein said yesterday:
The economy’s continuing failure to produce meaningful numbers of jobs, reinforced by other bread-and-butter concerns such as rising healthcare costs, looms as the greatest vulnerability for Bush in the general election campaign that effectively began last week….
With the government report Friday that the economy produced just 21,000 new jobs in February, total employment is down by more than 2.2 million since he took office. Barring a miraculous recovery, Bush is fated to become the first president since Herbert Hoover to suffer a net loss of jobs over a full presidential term.
There aren’t many inviolate rules in American politics, but in an election year it’s safe to say no president wants his name plausibly placed in the same sentence as Herbert Hoover’s….
Fewer Americans were working in January 2003 than in January 2002. Even fewer Americans were working in January 2004 than in January 2003. Manufacturing employment has declined in every single month of the Bush presidency.
These are not numbers that scream four more years.
To help make the case, I have some visual aids.
First, I’d like to see this graph, which Kos ran last month, published in as many places as humanly possible.
It helps paint Bush’s record in a helpful historical context and it makes the first President Bush look like an economic genius by comparison. (Yes, Reagan’s name is spelled wrong, but it’s still a useful graph.)
Second, this graph, courtesy of Paul Krugman in today’s New York Times, is equally helpful, but for different reasons.
The first graph shows Bush’s record on job to be, if you’ll pardon the phrase, a miserable failure. But the second is helpful in rebutting White House rhetoric.
The administration would have us believe that the poor employment market is some bizarre result of the recession that they claim (falsely) Clinton handed Bush. But this second graph highlights clearly what the White House said would happen vs. what actually happened.
Bush kept telling the nation about the incredible results in the job market so long as he got to cut taxes for the wealthy. True to form, Congress passed each of his proposed cuts. And yet as this graph makes abundantly clear, Bush has been terribly, embarrassingly wrong every step of the way. Anyone who continues to see the president as a credible voice on job creation simply hasn’t been paying attention.
Economic forecasting isn’t an exact science, but wishful thinking on this scale is unprecedented. Nor can the administration use its all-purpose excuse: all of these forecasts date from after 9/11. What you see in this chart is the signature of a corrupted policy process, in which political propaganda takes the place of professional analysis.