Well, it looks like I was wrong earlier this week. I don’t think these numbers are good or bad enough to help either side much :

America’s payrolls picked up in August, with the economy adding 144,000 jobs, slightly less than economists were forecasting and highlighting the slow and uneven recovery in the labor market that jobseekers have braved.

The unemployment rate dipped to 5.4 percent last month from 5.5 percent in July, the Labor Department reported Friday. While the new jobless rate was the lowest since October 2001, the drop in the unemployment rate in August came as people left the work force for any number of reasons. Economists were predicting the jobless rate to hold steady in August.
. . .
“As far as employment growth goes, it was okay. Nothing good, but nothing terrible,” said economist Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors.
. . .
Economists want to see at least 200,000 net jobs added a month on a consistent basis before declaring the labor market fully healed.

On the surface, this helps Bush a little since the 144K figure sounds big. At least, big enough to brag about on the stump. On the other hand, it’s not even enough to keep up with population growth.

The positive news for Kerry here is that the Bushies knew this job report was coming and that any negative numbers would be used against them. So with that in mind, they seem to have toned down the economic portions of his speech. Not that shit like an “ownership society” makes much sense. The end result was a speech that was a laundry list of recycled proposals.

Bush will probably get the bigger gains out of this job report, things are still really easy for John Kerry to spin. Here’s an excellent suggestion from Brad DeLong :

144,000 increase in payroll employment in August, just enough to keep us from losing ground relative to the growing labor force. A nonfarm employment level of 131.47 million–but according to the forecast the Bushies released last February, it was projected to be 133.18 million by now.

I, at least, would very much like to know how George W. Bush answers the following question: “What has gone wrong with the economy to leave us with an employment level 1.7 million below what you projected last February that it would be by now?”

For more background on the February forecast, check out this bit from the Labor Research Association :

White House Counsel of Economic Advisors Chairman Gregory Mankiw stumbled in early February when he said that outsourcing U.S. jobs abroad was, in the long term, good for the economy. His remarks sparked outrage from labor officials and Democrats and energetic back-pedaling from the White House.

Mankiw?s office also crafted the 2004 Economic Report of the President, the administration?s annual tome on economic trends. In the latest edition, White House economists pondered whether jobs at fast-food establishments like McDonald?s might more accurately be termed manufacturing jobs. Democrats swiftly seized on the gaffe, noting that the Orwellian re-definition could camouflage the more than two million manufacturing jobs lost since Bush?s inauguration.

And on the employment front, meanwhile, Bush has distanced himself from job-creation forecasts in the CEA?s Economic Report of the President, probably aware of how inaccurate the predictions really are and how sensitive the issue will be in the race for the White House.

The CEA has predicted that the average number of jobs existing for all of 2004 will be just shy of 133 million. But because there are now roughly 2.5 million jobs fewer than that, there will have to be well more than 133 million jobs in existence by December 2004, according to two liberal Washington think thanks, the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

And reality has caught up with the White House prediction that its tax cut of 2003 would create some 5.5 million jobs between July 2003 and December 2004, EPI and CBPP said. In the first seven months, just 296,000 jobs have been created, or about 5% of the White House forecast.

?Since the administration projected that 2,142,000 jobs would have been created by now, actual job creation fell 1,846,000 short of this mark,? their report said. ?To reach the 5.5 million target by the end of 2004, job growth would have to average 473,000 per month? from February through December, according to the report.

And this is what I think should be the Johns ultimate message coming out of the GOP convention. It’s not that Bush is a liar or a puppet or a fool, but that he’s a failure.

It’s one thing to hit at Bush in an angry way, but I think we’ll be far more successfull if our criticism takes on a more sad and pathetic tone. If we simply use his own words against him and act disappointed, not only will it make him look like a screwup, but it’ll probably end up emasculating him in a way that will only help boost Kerry.