Spin can't hide the economic slide
NEW YORK
POLITICIANS and journalists who fool with economic information at the height of a presidential election need to remember a fundamental truth: Numbers are mostly for politicians and journalists, increasingly removed from the experiences of real life.
For the elites, numbers are what economists call coincident indicators -- stuff that informs on current developments.
For ordinary Americans, numbers are lagging indicators, the factual detail about an already experienced trend; like Bob Dylan, they understand you don't need a weatherman to tell which way the wind's blowing. They are already living the reality.
For politicians that means that spinning is not only mostly silly, it can be dangerous because the reality check doesn't just come from the commentariat; it comes from reality itself. Last month's jobs data, so manicly anticipated and pre-hyped, is the perfect case in point.
In their first issues tussle of the postconvention, predebates period, President Bush opted for hype, John Kerry for non-Chicken Little sobriety.
The Bush-Cheney spinners have at least given up their post-Democratic convention slogan that the economy has turned the corner and there's no turning back. However, the claim that 144,000 new jobs in August is proof of anything amounts to leading with your chin.
Americans already know about what Alan Greenspan famously called this summer's "soft patch." On average the economy was generating 295,000 new jobs a month during the three months beginning in March. For the three months beginning in June, the average has fallen by far more than half to just over 100,000. At 144,000 new jobs last month, the economy is not quite generating enough opportunity to accommodate new labor force entrants; indeed, the only way unemployment can technically inch "down" in such an environment is when there are fewer such entrants, not a healthy sign.
Where politicians can make a contribution, as John Kerry did over the weekend, is by pointing out the difference between what a president says his policies will produce and what is actually produced. When the most recent of the gigantic Bush tax cuts was approved last summer, his administration pledged that the result would be 5.5 million new jobs by the end of this year; Bush is already short some 2.6 million of those.
Historical comparison is also useful. Since the government began collecting monthly employment data in the late 1930s, every single recovery from every single downturn since has made up all of its job losses by the 31st recovery month. Indeed, the average length of the full job recovery period has been just 20 months if you leave out one, interesting period.
I say interesting because this period, 1991-92, not only followed another very brief and shallow recession, it was of course the period that preceded his dad's defeat. In other words, the truly anemic job market the United States is enduring right now is without post-Depression precedent.
Politicians always need a narrative to frame their presentations. One of the many facts that makes Bush vulnerable this year is that his narrative of the economy since 2000 makes no sense to the people who experienced it.
Consider: He "inherited" a brief recession that began in March 2001, and then 9/11 and a raft of business scandals ensued, but we're back and his policies, above all the tax cuts, are working.
The truth as people experienced it: A decline in business investment triggered a recession lasting at most a few months, 9/11 barely put a dent in the consumer who kept going into debt to keep spending, but it's been three years and not only has the economy not recovered yet, it is flirting with stagnation again. Ordinary people never got much tax relief, no more is in store, and with wage income flat as a pancake, and health, energy and education costs soaring, the squeeze couldn't be tighter.
That narrative fits a challenger's role, which makes it no surprise at all that Kerry's initial burst of TV advertising this month is focused on the economy, and tailored to each of the battleground states where it is appearing.
As a sometime contrarian, however, I was more interested to hear that despite the focus of the Republican convention on war and Kerry's fitness for command, the Bush-Cheney campaign is also advertising about economics after months of Kerry bashing.
The first batch of commercials almost makes the president out to be something other than the president: He will propose a "simpler" tax code; he has a plan to lower health care costs, he favors less dependence on foreign energy. You almost expect one of the ads to declare that Bush is so upset with the status quo that he thinks the incumbents should be tossed from office so new leadership can take over.
In one of the ads, the claim is made that while the United States is standing tall post-9/11, "we need to make our economy more job friendly to keep American jobs here in America."
In New York terms, the audience would be forgiven for snapping back, "Where ya been, pal?"
Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com. 