Last week, National Journal conducted an unscientific poll of Democratic Party insiders, asking them, among other things, to “pick the issue that they expect will be Bush’s biggest liability” in the upcoming election. Bush’s favors for corporate interests came in first, a poor economy came in a close second. Way down at number five, however, was Bush’s record on creating jobs.
Perhaps some of the insiders were thinking about unemployment when they chose the more generic “economic record” as Bush’s biggest problem, but it seems to me the president’s record on job creation, or in his case, his record on job losses, has enormous potential in the coming campaign.
I can think of Karl Rove’s reply for most of Bush’s failures, particularly on the economy. They’re not true, nor are they particularly persuasive, but it’s easy to imagine what the Bush-Cheney campaign will be saying.
Slow economic growth? Yeah, but it’s getting better. The biggest deficits in the history of the world? Yeah, but they’re not the biggest ever as a percentage of GDP, and besides, voters have never been all-that engaged on the issue anyway. Sharp decreases in the stock market? Yeah, but the market is almost back to where it was when Bush was inaugurated.
Trying to guess what Bush will say about unemployment is a little trickier. This is a president with the worst record on job creation since the Great Depression. He’ll be the first president since Hoover to experience negative job growth over the course of a term in office. Bush, up until recently, oversaw 22 consecutive months of job losses — the longest such streak since WWII.
What’s worse, Bush kept promising robust job creation as a result of his massive tax cuts for the wealthy. And yet every solution Bush proposed to create new jobs failed. Miserably.
The best the administration will probably come up with is noting that the national unemployment rate is actually about 5.9%, which, historically, isn’t terrible. It’s up considerably from the Clinton years, of course, when the U.S. had the strongest job market in generations, but 5.9% is not exactly a horrific number.
A terrific report in yesterday’s LA Times, however, explains that the official unemployment rate underestimates just how poor the labor market really is.
To begin with, there are the 8.7 million unemployed, defined as those without a job who are actively looking for work. But lurking behind that group are 4.9 million part-time workers…who say they would rather be working full time — the highest number in a decade.
There are also the 1.5 million people who want a job but didn’t look for one in the last month. Nearly a third of this group say they stopped the search because they were too depressed about the prospect of finding anything. Officially termed “discouraged,” their number has surged 20% in a year.
Add these three groups together and the jobless total for the U.S. hits 9.7%, up from 9.4% a year ago.
No wonder the Democratic presidential candidates have seized on jobs as a potentially powerful weapon.
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A number of economists say it’s a mistake to evaluate the job market solely by talking about the official unemployment rate. It’s a blunt instrument for assessing a condition that is growing ever more vague.
“There’s certainly an arbitrariness to the official rate,” says Princeton University economics professor Alan Krueger. “It irks me that it’s not put in proper perspective.”
I heard a lot of talk from worried Democrats when the Dow broke 10,000 again and the GDP surged in the third quarter, believing that these economic improvements will improve Bush’s chances on Election Day. But it seems to me, once the election rolls around, working Americans will care far less about the GDP than they do unemployment.
Bush has overseen one of the worst job markets most Americans have ever seen, all the while promising that his tax cuts for millionaires would take care of everything. Unfortunately for Bush, there’s no easy way to avoid this unpleasant reality.