Clinton Gets Little Credit for Economic Turnaround : Policy: Advisers bemoan negative media coverage of President. They say he’s responsible for job growth, deficit reduction.

Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich is frustrated, and doesn’t mind letting off a little steam when asked why he thinks his boss isn’t getting credit for the nation’s job-rich recovery.

Reich can’t understand why President Clinton’s approval ratings are sinking even while he presides over a robust turnaround that has generated 4.1 million jobs since January, 1993. What’s more, on his second Labor Day in office, the President is ahead of the pace needed to live up to his promise of generating 8 million jobs in his four-year term; that growth has come at a time when inflation remains under control and the federal budget deficit is plunging.

“Why isn’t he getting credit? You tell me,” Reich demands, adding, “The negative press coverage of the President has been at the heart of it.”

For the Clinton Administration, the failure of good employment and economic data to provide a political tonic for Clinton remains a mystery.

All summer, as the Administration has struggled with other nagging problems, White House officials have repeatedly been frustrated by their inability to emphasize the positive and get the public to recognize the President for his economic accomplishments.

As a result, Clinton policy-makers are beginning to echo the complaints of their predecessors in the George Bush White House about media coverage of the economy.

Overshadowed is another factor that some analysts outside the Administration suggest may loom larger: the deep-seated structural problems that are generating a feeling of insecurity among some Americans, and that can’t be dispelled by less than two years’ worth of positive data.

“I think there is a jarring disconnect between media coverage and the very fine performance that we are seeing from the U.S. economy,” complains Laura D’Andrea Tyson, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. “I could go down the list of all the statistics that people normally look at. . . . I could put the numbers from the Clinton years side by side with the statistics from the Bush Administration, and I think a class of Econ 101 students would all agree by any objective measure that our performance has been far better.”

Clinton has gotten less credit than might be expected. While presidents only influence the economy on the margins, they still usually receive either credit or blame for its overall performance.

In Clinton’s case, while the economic trends have generally been good during his term, 60% of network television stories about the economy have been negative, a study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs says.

“I think it is true that Clinton hasn’t gotten credit for the economy in the media,” said Robert Lichter, director of the center. “And that translates into the public’s perception of Clinton’s handling of the economy. One of the big changes I think we’ve seen in the last 10 years is that the media-generated perception of the economy is beginning to have a much bigger impact on people’s perception of conditions than ever before.”

Yet even Tyson acknowledges that there may be more to it than just bad press. The larger economic trends that are squeezing some industries and types of jobs have left many unconvinced that the White House has improved their own personal outlook.

While the recovery has generated millions of jobs during the past 19 months, there remains a continuing decline in wages and in the overall American standard of living. Coupled with the psychological impact of large corporate layoffs on Americans’ sense of job security, those trends seem to have generated anxiety that is stubbornly resistant to the medicinal balm of the recovery.

“It’s great that we have job growth and unemployment is dropping, but we haven’t done anything as a country to address our long-term problems,” said Lawrence Mishel, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington and author of the just-published “The State of Working America.”

“And so the middle-class squeeze that Bill Clinton railed against and made an issue in the 1992 campaign is still going on. People are still working more for less. And on that score Clinton hasn’t delivered,” he said.

Mishel documented, for example, that U.S. wages, adjusted for inflation, have stagnated despite the recovery. Between 1989 and 1993, median real wages fell 2.6%; there has been only a little improvement since. “In the summer of 1994, we are just starting to return to the levels for family income that we saw before the recession in 1989,” Mishel said.

Tyson agrees and says that the long-term decline in living standards has taken two decades to build up--and that it can’t be reversed in one or two years.

“If you look at median family income over a long period of time, you see that median compensation has shown very little growth over the last two decades, which means that half of Americans have seen stagnation or decline in incomes, and that leads to greater anxiety,” she said.

The causes of stagnant wages are buried deep in the engine that drives growth--U.S. productivity. While American companies and workers have seen their productivity level rise from its 1980s lows, it still has not returned to the level of the 1960s. Ultimately, living standards are linked to the nation’s ability to turn out high-quality products at low prices--a good definition of productivity.

The income gap between highly educated workers and unskilled laborers is also continuing to widen under Clinton, increasing the sense among Americans that the benefits of the recovery are not being equally shared. The top 25% of American families accounted for 51.3% of total national income in 1992, up from 48.2% in 1980.

Reich acknowledges that this trend has not slowed since Clinton’s team took over, and it has played a role in creating what he terms a new “anxious class” of Americans. “The notion that we’re creating a bounty of bad jobs is a myth. Most new jobs are good jobs. The problem is that the jobs that remain for workers without skills or with the wrong skills are becoming grimmer and grimmer,” he said.

But what’s worse for the Administration is that the best economic news may already be in the past for Clinton.

The Federal Reserve Board’s five interest rate hikes this year finally seem to be reining in the recovery. And economists fear that Friday’s report of a slowdown in job growth in August could be a sign that Clinton will have a hard time matching the performance of his first two years in office.

Mishel said he has told Tyson and other Administration policy-makers to stop worrying about the broad macroeconomic measures and begin figuring out how to repair frayed American living standards.

That, of course, is a tall order. The Administration’s training, apprenticeship and education initiatives are seen as a good start toward reducing long-term unemployment, but budget constraints and Clinton’s commitment to deficit reduction make it unlikely he will ever be able to spend much more to spur job growth.