Prosperity, where are you?
WASHINGTON
AT THE White House these days, there is a reason the resident propagandists insist on using the word ''recovery," as opposed to ''prosperity." Recovery is the ultimate process word in a political economy. It implies progress but is meant to help the mind slide by the past and the present as it makes assumption about the future without any hard predictions.
There's just one problem, and it lies behind the decision to waste President Bush's weekly radio time on the economy last weekend in order to stage a show-and-tell with his domestic advisers and manufacture photo opportunities out of the signing of two pieces of legislation that have nothing to do with prosperity. One was an energy bill that will have no impact on price or supply; the other a highway measure that will only have impact on the reelection prospects of legislators who supported its budget-busting projects.
The underlying problem is that the vaunted recovery is well over three years old, way past the time when in the ordinary course of events recoveries morph into prosperity. In fact, this so-called recovery is already the slowest and puniest in post-Depression history, despite the fact that the event the country is supposedly recovering from was so minor it barely registered on the scales and despite the fact that the economy has received more stimulus from hemorrhaging deficits and easy money than it has ever received in modern times.
At the White House, ''recovery" is also the preferred term because of the public opinion polls to which its employees are addicted. Views of Bush's handling of the economy remain strongly negative -- by nearly 15 percent in latest samplings.
The other big mess on Bush's watch that is evoking an even more negative reaction is his handling of Iraq. In both cases, positive opinion is below 40 percent. The only reason opinion overall on Bush's job performance remains divided is that this guy who once promised unifying over divisive government keeps pressing every hot button in sight to keep Americans at each other's throats over social issues government can't resolve.
The economy and Iraq are, in one sense, linked politically. What links them is credibility. One of the arrows in the president's quiver used to be his image as a straight shooter. On that one, however, steady erosion has cost him the trust of Americans who aren't ideologues.
This is the backdrop for what ought to be seen as good news -- last week's report that the economy added more than 200,000 jobs in July, its best performance in four months and powerful evidence that growth is continuing. Others include continued gains in business investment, a recent dip in inventories that foreshadows a fresh round of shelf-stacking, and continued strength in consumer spending (albeit with the aid of way too much debt).
The problem is the past, the present, and the future. Since business investment collapsed four years ago as the dot-com bubble burst, the economy has shed 3 million manufacturing jobs. They are not coming back. In their place, there was at first nothing and then a gradual growth in non-manufacturing employment. It may not be literally true that Americans who once had decent-paying jobs with benefits now have lower-paying jobs with few if any benefits, but for a huge chunk of America that is a reality at which politicians cannot wave the rhetorical wand of ''recovery."
To be more precise, the country has still not recovered its lost jobs. In the private economy not tied to the boom-bust cycle of military spending, employment is still slightly down from its prerecession level and is not likely to catch up before the end of this year. Americans also know that the very brief dip in economic output four years ago was followed by a painfully slow resumption of growth. They also know that the tiny bits of improvement spiced by three rounds of tax cuts have been eroded or wiped out at the gasoline pump and in the sharp escalation of health care and housing costs.
To be more precise, the country's median household income after modest inflation dipped in 2001, 2002, and 2003, for a cumulative drop of more than 3 percent, or $1,500-plus. There was a turnaround last year timed for the election, but few experts expect this year's figure to be better than the 2004 data.
No wonder, most people are dissatisfied. And no wonder so many Americans worry about the future, given the enormous extent to which growth has come from record government deficits, exploding private debt, the new bubble in housing, and the exploding costs of unending war.
Only at the White House might the public be viewed as grumpy and ungrateful. The president gets low marks on the economy because his record stinks.
Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com. 
