You Can't Spin This

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I've seen this countless times before — and, as Weird Al Yankovic put it in his parody of MC Hammer's hip hop song, I can't watch this. I feel as if I have seen this before, and I don't want to watch this again.

But I don't really have a choice.

The monthly jobless report was released today, and, in the wake of recent economic reports, it came as no surprise to learn that unemployment went up to 8.2% in May. It was, however, a bit of a surprise that only 69,000 jobs were added to the economy in May — and, considering the fact that job gains in recent months were revised downward, it may well be that, when the dust finally settles, there may be no net job gains in May — there may even be net job losses.

Sixty–nine thousand jobs doesn't even cover average monthly population gains — let alone make a dent in the number of long–term unemployed.

Barack Obama's re–election campaign has been banking on continued evidence of an economic recovery — even the 0.1% gains that have been witnessed in some recent months would be preferable to the loss that was reported today. Economic experts have been saying for several weeks that they think the jobs situation will deteriorate this summer.

In other words, the worst is yet to come.

If a gain of any kind had been registered in May, it might still have been possible (if the economy managed to lower the unemployment rate by 0.2% per month) for the rate to be as low for Obama this November as it was when the voters re–elected Ronald Reagan in 1984.

And that is what the Obama campaign craves — an opportunity to run for a second term with a jobless rate equal to the one that existed for the Gipper.

Ain't gonna happen.

The first half of Reagan's first term resembled Obama's, with unemployment rates in double–digit territory. But the economy began to recover in 1983, and Reagan was re–elected, even though the unemployment rate was higher than it had been for any incumbent seeking a second term since the days of FDR.

However, the recovery of 1984 was more sustained, far more robust than this one, which has gone in fits and starts, like all the other "recoveries" since we were told the recession ended three years ago. Where Reagan sprinted to the finish line under the "Morning in America" banner, Obama is limping in that direction.

And jobs reports like the one that came out today are pressing the president into the "stay the course" mode that Reagan followed in the 1982 midterm elections — and resulted in the loss of 26 House seats for Reagan's Republicans — which doesn't have the inspirational quality of hope and change.

"Obama sees the glass as half full, arguing the economy is slowly improving and asking voters to trust him to help nurture a full recovery," writes Tom Raum of the Associated Press.

"No president since Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression has won re–election with an unemployment rate as high as it is today," continues Raum.

"It was 7.2 percent when President Ronald Reagan defeated Walter Mondale in 1984."

That doesn't inspire confidence, especially since Obama has shown a marked inclination to lecture people (one of the prominent criticisms of Jimmy Carter when he ran against Reagan in 1980).

Even the New York Times, normally a cheerleader for the Obama administration, has found it hard to put a positive spin on this.

"Economists can explain away a month or two of disappointing numbers," writes the Times' Shaila Dewan. "But this was the third consecutive disappointing monthly performance by the job market, following a winter of solid gains, convincing many that the economic recovery has, for the third year in a row, lost momentum."

Three strikes and you're out.

I can't watch this.

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Burning Down the House

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The seemingly irreconcilable conflict over the debt ceiling has the potential to burn down the nation's economic house — and, with it, the political house as well.

Let me backtrack a bit.

There just wasn't anything good about last week's jobs report. It was bad news across the board. For all incumbents. No matter on which side of the fence you may stand.

It's probably worse for Democrats right now since they hold the White House and the Senate. Republicans hold only the House, but there is no reason for them to feel smug, either. And that certainly doesn't mean that House Democrats or Senate Republicans are immune (although a case could be made for Senate Republicans).

No incumbent can assume that he/she is safe because the incumbents are responsible for making the system work — and it ain't working.

Unemployment went up for the third straight month. Many economists had been anticipating at least a modest rebound for the American economy, with fuel prices easing and all that.

But I guess I should have known something wicked this way came because gas prices around here have been going up lately. (I don't know what they've been like where you live, but I paid about $3.38/gallon a couple of weeks ago at the station down the street and today, the price at that very same station is $3.59/gallon.)

And then came what I have often heard described as a bucket of cold water on the recovery — the unemployment rate is the highest it has been since last September.

My friends who support Barack Obama don't like to hear this because it contradicts their cozy view of the world — but his Republican opponent in 2012 is going to be much less important than his record in office — and that record is not too great right now.

Oh, they like to remind me that George W. Bush was president when the economy went south, and they like to recite Obama's legislative achievements, but the bottom line is that fingerpointing and a list doesn't put food on the table or keep a roof over your head.

They like to tsk, tsk among themselves and shake their heads disapprovingly over the possibility of facing an extremist like Michele Bachmann or Newt Gingrich or Sarah Palin in the general election because they think the choice is obvious if that comes to pass. In fact, as far as they are concerned, it isn't a choice at all — so they keep talking about those rivals because they are certain that those candidates are not electable.

And they'd like to see one of them win the GOP nomination. Then, as they see it, the election will become a slam dunk for Obama.

But it isn't going to be that simple.

Oh, I expect the Republicans to nominate someone who is more conservative than Obama. That's a given. The Republicans are the conservatives in our political universe, the Democrats are the liberals. And, in today's Democrat Party, anyone to the right of Nancy Pelosi is considered suspect.

It's no better on the Republican side, where anyone to the left of John Boehner tends to be regarded as a RINO.

That leaves an incredibly large bloc of politically homeless Americans in the middle who are being stretched too thin by two polarized parties, and I think more Americans may well be receptive to the idea of a third party or an independent candidate than they have been for a couple of decades.

Unless an insurgent candidate pops up to challenge Obama for the nomination, we already know who will be nominated by the Democrats. I doubt that the Republicans will nominate an extremist, but, contrary to all the discussions I hear, I also doubt that it will matter.

The dynamics of a race that features an incumbent are entirely different from the dynamics of a race that has no incumbent on the ballot. Obama won a non–incumbent race in 2008. Now, he must win a different kind of race. Historically, the rules for such a race are crystal clear.

If the incumbent is meeting or exceeding expectations, like Ronald Reagan in 1984 or Bill Clinton in 1996, he will win, possibly in a landslide. If not (see the gentlemen who were replaced by Reagan and Clinton four years earlier — when many disaffected Americans opted for an independent candidate rather than either of the major–party nominees), he will be defeated, again possibly in a landslide.

What will matter is what conditions are like when the voters go to the polls — and we can't know, in July 2011, what those conditions will be in November 2012.

No, sir, voters are not fortune tellers, and they can be fickle. What they like today they may very well dislike tomorrow — and vice versa — but they do have an idea which way the wind is blowing right now — and it isn't at their backs.

Relentlessly high unemployment has dragged consumer confidence to its lowest level in three years, writes Vicki Needham in The Hill — and who knows where consumer confidence will be on Election Day?

I do know that the electorate has been impatient lately. How could the incumbents possibly have missed that fact? In House elections, where the volatility has been more pronounced, one party has taken at least 20 seats from the other in the last three elections.

Is that significant? You tell me. Prior to 2006, it was extremely rare for either party to take as many as 10 seats from the other in a single election. If a double–digit movement did occur, it was considered a shift of seismic proportions. In the last three elections, more than 100 House seats have flipped from one party to the other.

Here's something else: The first of July has come and gone with no one, to my knowledge, observing that it was the second anniversary of the date when the recession was said to have ended.

Two years of "recovery" have brought zero net movement in the unemployment rate — yet Obama's top political adviser is deep in denial, insisting that Americans won't care about the jobless rate when they go to the polls.

Nonsense. It's the only issue many voters do care about.

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The Deficit Debate

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Christiane Amanpour just might have heard it all in her career as a journalist.

She was primarily a foreign correspondent in nearly 20 years with CNN, doing most of her work in the Middle East. She had to dodge a lot of bullets and bombs.

Thus, I would think that a tour of Wisconsin town hall meetings with Rep. Paul Ryan would be relatively tame by comparison.

But it wasn't. Not when Ryan told Amanpour that the deficit will be "the greatest topic of the 2012 election."

Excuse me?

I'm inclined to agree with Jonathan Cohn, who writes in The New Republic that the emphasis is on the wrong thing.

"[T]he trouble isn't that the economy is deteriorating," he writes. "It's that the economy hasn't recovered from the deterioration that took place in 2008 and 2009."

His argument is that the economy needs a boost.

My argument is that such a boost will come when anything and everything that can be done to encourage job creation is being done.

It's the same argument, really. Cohn essentially says that millions of Americans still need jobs — and both parties are wasting precious time arguing about the deficit.

The importance of the jobs situation should be obvious to someone like the president, who fancies himself to be as politically sure–footed as they come. Yet he has launched a re–election campaign that openly appeals to three groups that played prominent roles in 2008 — young voters, blacks and Hispanics — even though all three continue to suffer.

It is as frustrating — and pointless — as the bickering between the Republicans and Democrats about what can be done to lower gas prices. Jeff Mason of Reuters calls it "symbolism and sympathy" — and, although he directs his criticism largely at the president, it could apply to congressional Republicans as well.

It's the way politics is played in America these days, no matter which party is in control. There's always a smoke screen to divert attention from the things that need to be discussed, and I fear 2012 will be no different.

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The Job Isn't Finished

A couple of months ago, James Pethokoukis of Reuters observed that, for Barack Obama, the number for re–election may not be 270 (as in the number of electoral votes that are needed) but 215 (as in how many thousands of jobs need to be gained — on average — every month between now and November 2012 if the unemployment rate is going to drop below 8%).

Well, actually, Pethokoukis reported that Matt McDonald, an analyst for Hamilton Place Strategies, made that observation.

No matter who said it, I was reminded of that number when yesterday's jobless report came out. Lo and behold, 216,000 jobs were added in March.

Mission accomplished — for March.

That is a significant number, and it will continue to be significant for Obama's electoral hopes because, as McDonald told Pethokoukis, the national unemployment rate has been above 7% in only four presidential election years since 1960. The incumbent was on the ballot each time — and, in three of those elections, the incumbent was defeated.

The exception was Ronald Reagan, who had seen unemployment drop by 1.3 percentage points in the year leading up to his re–election campaign.

So, using that as an historic yardstick, Obama needs unemployment, which currently stands at 8.8%, to drop to about 7.5% in order to have the expectation that joblessness won't be the crushing election issue that it was for Presidents Ford, Carter and Bush I.

That still would be higher than the rate under Reagan, McDonald acknowledges, but the decline in a year's time would be comparable, and that should lead to a sense that joblessness is easing.

McDonald gives Obama a break. Based on his calculations, the unemployment rate would slip below 8% — barely — by Election Day.

He sets the bar much lower than I do. I look at it in terms of duplicating what contributed to the only successful re–election strategy under comparable conditions in the last 50 years. To get close to the unemployment rate that still permitted Reagan to campaign plausibly under the slogan "Morning in America," way more than 215,000 jobs need to be added to the economy on a monthly basis.

I'm not an economist, though, so I'll rely on McDonald's figures, and he does make a compelling case:

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"If we assume a straight–line projection of job growth and further assume 120,000 new entrants to the job market every month, the economy would need to create 215,000 jobs per month every month between now and November 2012 to get the unemployment rate below 8 percent. Every month we are above 215,000 new jobs, it gets a little easier to reach that 8 percent goal and every month we are below 215,000, it gets a little harder."

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Well, we broke even in March.

According to McDonald's formula, the ultimate goal is neither easier nor harder to achieve than it was before.

There is still much work to be done.

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Where Is The Outrage?

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"More than three years after we entered the worst economic slump since the 1930s, a strange and disturbing thing has happened to our political discourse: Washington has lost interest in the unemployed.

"... [N]o jobs bills have been introduced in Congress, no job–creation plans have been advanced by the White House and all the policy focus seems to be on spending cuts.

"So one–sixth of America's workers — all those who can't find any job or are stuck with part–time work when they want a full–time job — have, in effect, been abandoned."

Paul Krugman
New York Times

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If you read that excerpt in an opinion piece and had no idea what the identity of the author might be, you'd probably think it came from one of his diehard critics.

Well, perhaps not. But you probably wouldn't think the criticism came from someone who considers himself a liberal.

It did.

Paul Krugman is a widely respected economist. In fact, he is the 13th–most cited economist in the world, according to Research Papers in Economics (RePEc), and he is a self–professed liberal.

Now, I was raised by progressive parents, and, for many years as an adult, I voted accordingly. My politics have shifted more to the center as I have gotten older, but I feel qualified to make the kind of assessment I am about to make ...

... which is ...

I believe there are essentially two kinds of liberals in America today, and you will find them in all walks of life. Some are economists. Some are journalists. Some are economic journalists. Krugman happens to be an economist who is also a journalist.

One kind of liberal cares more about the success of the Obama presidency than the results of his policies — because of (I can only presume) what Barack Obama represents. The logic behind this (and, again, this is my presumption) is that the first black president must be seen as a success because there will not be a second black president if he is not.

For that kind of liberal, perception is more important than reality. When the reality does not support the perception, it is because of racism — or something else that is beyond Obama's control.

To suggest otherwise undermines Obama's presidency.

The other kind of liberal is more realistic. To those liberals, Obama is a president who happens to be black. When he was battling Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2008, it wasn't about black vs. female to those liberals. It was about who could get the job done.

Once the Democrats had settled on their nominee, those liberals backed him enthusiastically, even if they had not done so in the primaries. And now, when they see policies that are not succeeding, they do not hesitate to point that out.

A recent example that comes to mind is Ruth Marcus' column in the Washington Post about seven weeks ago, in which she worried about an absence of leadership in the aftermath of the State of the Union address.

That places policy above all other factors — personality, race, gender, everything — which is how it should be.

I think Krugman is caught somewhere in between. He has not hesitated to criticize policy. In fact, when Congress was voting on the stimulus package in the early days of the Obama presidency, Krugman often criticized it for not being enough — and, with hundreds of thousands of Americans slipping through the cracks two years later, one can only conclude that he was right about that.

But, in spite of the fact that he was so skeptical about the chances of the package's success when he believed that so much more money would be needed to repair the economy, he went along with it — often because (it seemed) that he was willing to give more than the usual amount of time for Obama to become comfortable in the job.

Today, however, Krugman seems to have reached his tolerance limit, and he tells readers, in today's New York Times, that "Washington has lost interest in the unemployed."

He seems genuinely baffled by this since, as he points out, "polls indicate that voters still care much more about jobs than they do about the budget deficit." Thus, he finds it "quite remarkable" that "it's just the opposite" in Washington.

He delves into some economic principles that are probably over the heads of most people, but then he gets back to the point that really ought to outrage the people who voted for Obama expecting him to be the champion and the defender of the average guy, the oppressed, the down–trodden.

"[T]he obsession with spending cuts flourishes all the same," he writes, "unchallenged, it must be said, by the White House."

He now asserts that Obama "surrendered very early" in the "war of ideas" and that it is understandable why most Americans see little difference between what Obama says about spending cuts and what Republicans say. Many Americans who are still employed no longer feel threatened by layoffs because that wave appears to have crested.

But, like the tsunamis that followed the earthquakes in Japan and Indonesia, they have left a great deal of human wreckage in their wake.

The price for this "unfortunate bipartisanship" in Washington, Krugman writes, will be paid by "[t]he increasingly hopeless unemployed."

"[Y]ou have to wonder," Krugman writes, "what it will take to get politicians caring again about America's forgotten millions."

Perhaps it's time for a bumper sticker that says "I'm unemployed and I vote."

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Word Games

When you've been out of work for awhile, you really start to notice the word games that politicians play with job numbers.

Take today's jobs report, for example. It kind of reminded me of the reaction in June 2009 to the news that fewer jobs had been lost in the previous month than expected. The losses were still in double digits and the unemployment rate climbed to 9.4% when economists had predicted it would go up to 9.2%.

But the focus was on the fact that the pace of job losses was slowing. Things were getting better, we were told. Folks in the administration hailed the report as proof that things were moving in the right direction.

Hold your horses, I warned people. Let's see what happens in the next two or three ... or more ... months. But no one heard me. The sound of popping champagne corks was too loud, I suppose.

Reality slapped some folks in the face the next month. Job losses were worse than expected, nearly half a million.

Anyway, back to today's report.

The economy added jobs, which was good, but it added one–third fewer jobs than expected, which was not so good.

However, the unemployment rate dropped by 0.3 percentage points, to 9.4%, which was better than expected.

And that is what Barack Obama preferred to emphasize. "The trend is clear. The pace of hiring is beginning to pick up," he said upon hearing the news.

If that is, indeed, what we are witnessing, then that is a good thing, to be sure.

But, once again, I counsel my fellow Americans to wait and see if this really is an indicator of a long–term trend — or an exception to the rule.

And, while it is good that the president offers words of hope and encouragement to those who are struggling to find full–time work (something he has rarely done in the first two years of his presidency), he doesn't mention that one of the reasons that the unemployment rate has dropped is because it only counts those who have not exhausted their unemployment benefits.

Those who have exhausted their benefits are simply not counted. Whether they have found employment or not is irrelevant.

The president also doesn't talk about how many of the jobs that were created in December were of a temporary, seasonal nature. Not too much demand for shopping mall Santas and extra gift wrappers in March.

Sometimes this kind of talk can generate similar talk, and a kind of momentum gets going. If something like that happens and employers decide to just start hiring people en masse, that's great.

But let's wait a few more months before we open the champagne bottles.

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Imperial Hubris

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"Mr. Obama and the Democrats have wasted the once–in–a–lifetime opportunity handed to them in the 2008 election. They did not focus on jobs, jobs, jobs as their primary mission, and they did not call on Americans to join in a bold national effort (which would have required a great deal of shared sacrifice) to solve a wide range of very serious problems."

Bob Herbert
New York Times

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At least once in every presidency, it seems that a president is said to have squandered a golden opportunity that had been given to him by the voters or fate or whatever.

More than once, for example, I have heard George W. Bush criticized for failing to use September 11 as a way to unite a divided America in a common cause. In fact, he did precisely the opposite. He exploited it for political gain. He used it to drive wedges between people, between races, between faiths.

I will always believe that Bush was a terrible president, but, in all fairness, he did nothing most other presidents did not do. He just had far worse results than most — perhaps because he utilized far worse tactics than most.

What did he do?

Well, he bought into the myth that the president is infallible. And when a president is seduced by that particular myth, inevitably he makes at least one bad choice — and then spends the rest of his presidency, if not his life, justifying and rationalizing.

I don't know when this idea of infallibility took hold. But most presidents seem to have concluded — even if they entered the presidency as "men of the people" — that they know best. The transformation seems almost biblical. Apparently, all one must do to become infallible is to repeat the presidential oath of office.

Maybe there is something magical about that oath. Or maybe the American people are just natural enablers. That might explain a lot.

I suppose the attitude at its most extreme was summed up best by Richard Nixon, who told David Frost, "[W]hen the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."

I have seen no evidence that any other president crossed some criminal threshold in his actions, but history sure is loaded with bad presidential decisions.

And one of the worst may turn out to be Barack Obama's decision to emphasize health care reform over job creation when his presidency began — even though job losses had been increasing for months prior to his inauguration, and they continued, sometimes at alarming monthly levels, through his first year in office. (I criticized Obama in this blog last Labor Day when he declined to make any speeches about the nation's joblessness crisis — a decision that all too clearly demonstrated how much he cared about the unemployed.)

Despite occasional lip service, this president has done little in defense of the unemployed. He only seemed to discover the problem after his party lost its filibuster–proof majority in the Senate with Scott Brown's upset victory in Massachusetts.

That has been a tragic mistake.

The appearance of bipartisanship — so fervently desired that it was claimed to have been achieved if even a single Republican vote was drawn to the Democrats' side in either the House or the Senate — took greater precedence for Obama.

"Employment is the No. 1 issue for most ordinary Americans," writes Bob Herbert of the New York Times. "Their anxiety on this front only grows as they watch teachers, firefighters and police officers lining up to walk the unemployment plank as state and local governments wrestle with horrendous budget deficits.

"And what do these worried Americans see the Obama administration doing? It's doubling down on the war in Afghanistan, trying somehow to build a nation from scratch in the chaos of a combat zone."

From just about this time last year (when Democrat Al Franken was declared the winner in Minnesota) until this past January (when Brown won the seat that had belonged to Ted Kennedy), the Democrats could have done anything they wanted and the Republicans would have been virtually powerless to stop them. Why didn't they?

Why didn't they?

It's no wonder to me that people feel a disconnect between themselves and their government.

Want to know what really astonishes me? The administration's blase attitude toward unemployment in general has been stunning, but its apparent lack of interest in the joblessness epidemic among the nation's older workers truly is appalling.

Perhaps Obama isn't as smart as I gave him credit for. I mean, the numbers have shown that those who routinely vote in midterm elections are not the liberals or the young or the blacks — the groups that showed up in unprecedented numbers to elect Obama in 2008. Midterm voters tend to be older Americans. And CNN reported a few days ago that older Americans, particularly those 55 and older, who find themselves out of work face an especially daunting task in finding new jobs.

Doesn't common sense suggest that a president whose party holds majorities in both houses of Congress would want to do anything he could to appease older voters in a midterm election year? Including promoting legislation that would reward employers for hiring older Americans?

But Obama and the Democrats in Congress look backward instead of forward, assigning blame instead of standing up in defense of the jobless. They aren't accomplishing much for the unemployed, are they? A bill that would have extended jobless benefits through November failed. And, while Obama and the Democrats are justifiably proud of their achievement in passing health care reform, the truth in America today is that many must choose between health insurance and their daily expenses. Guess which one wins?

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"The Obama administration feels it should get a great deal of credit for its economic stimulus efforts, its health care initiative, its financial reform legislation, its vastly increased aid to education and so forth. And maybe if we were grading papers, there would be a fair number of decent marks to be handed out."

Bob Herbert

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"By nearly 2 to 1," Herbert says, "respondents to the most recent New York Times/CBS News poll believed the United States is on the wrong track. ... Mr. Obama is paying dearly for his tin ear on this topic. Fifty–four percent of respondents believed he does not have a clear plan for creating jobs. Only 45 percent approved of his overall handling of the economy, compared with 48 percent who disapproved."

Some of Obama's diehard apologists may think that is an aberration, but the truth is that other polls (NBC News/Wall Street Journal, Ipsos/McClatchy, Associated Press/GfK, ABC News/Washington Post) have reported similar, if not worse (Rasmussen) findings in recent weeks.

Things may well look different to most people three or four years from now, when the health care reforms are going to start to kick in. But right now, as Herbert points out, "Destitution is beckoning for those whose unemployment benefits are running out."

No matter what the Labor Department's figures tell you in a few days, most of America's unemployed could probably tell you they've had a bellyful of change.

But they're running short of hope.

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