Bush Hopes for Bounce off Employment News

With a jaunty thumbs-up, President Bush on Friday celebrated the nation’s surprising job growth -- easily the best news his reelection campaign has gotten in some time.

Apart from the positive economic signal it sent, the creation of more than 300,000 jobs last month provided an enormous psychological lift and welcome relief for Bush from recent controversy over the administration’s anti-terrorism efforts and this week’s horrific scenes from Fallouja, Iraq. The statistics also undercut -- at least for the time being -- one of the Democrats’ strongest arguments against Bush: the net loss of jobs since he took office.

The big question is whether March’s robust job growth can be sustained for the next seven months, through election day, or if the sunny statistics merely reflect a false spring.

“If there are anemic numbers released next month, everything is off,” said John McAdams, associate professor of political science at Marquette University in Wisconsin, a battleground state where a new poll showed Bush and Kerry in a close fight. “If more good numbers are released next month and the month after that and the month after that, Bush really has defused a major Democratic talking point.”

On Friday, presumed Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry and his allies could only disparage the newest job figures as good, but not good enough.

“Even a blind squirrel can find an acorn once in a while,” said Leo Gerard, international president of United Steelworkers of America, in a conference call arranged by Kerry’s campaign. “Having a month of some growth does not a jobs program make.”

Kerry, who is recovering from shoulder surgery, issued a statement welcoming the latest job statistics. But he also noted the loss of almost 2.6 million private-sector jobs under Bush.

“America’s families need and deserve a new economic strategy,” the Massachusetts senator said.

Democrats cited that net job loss over and over in Friday’s scripted sound bites, hoping that voters would view the recent turnaround in the context of the bigger -- and gloomier -- picture.

Both sides recognize that perception is more important for most voters than economic statistics. Indeed, few know that better than the president himself, whose father lost reelection in 1992 largely as a result of discontent over the economy -- which was beginning a decadelong boom in the final months of his administration.

The key is timing: President Reagan won a landslide reelection in 1984 after presiding over a steeper downturn than his successor, President George H.W. Bush. The difference was that the Reagan recovery began earlier in his first term, giving voter perceptions a chance to catch up with reality.

That is one reason the younger Bush and his campaign aides were so delighted with Friday’s job report.

“The most important factor is where [the voters] view the nation’s economy within the last year, not the last four years,” said Matthew Dowd, pollster for the president’s reelection effort.

Dowd noted that since August, the economy has created 760,000 jobs -- a figure Bush also cited as he stumped Friday in the coal country of West Virginia.

The president appeared in better spirits publicly on Friday than he has in a good while.

He started the day with a broad smile and a thumbs-up to reporters as he left Washington for West Virginia. Later, at a town hall meeting at Huntington’s Marshall University, he was jubilant as he told his audience: “This economy is strong and getting stronger.”

Perched on a stool at center stage in the campus theater, Bush traded jokes with students, employees and school administrators. He kidded about parenting teenagers, handed out nicknames, discussed the aches and pains of aging, and offered to serve as a reference for one job-seeking student.

The crowd -- packed with loyal Republicans -- gave Bush so many ovations that he finally began talking over their applause to speed things along.

What is not clear, apart from whether March’s impressive job growth continues, is where all those new positions are being created. Gerard, the United Steelworkers chief and Kerry ally, suggested the jobs would hardly be worth having if they were behind the counter at Wendy’s “assembling hamburgers.”

More to the political point is whether there have been tangible gains in the states likely to decide the November election.

The latest state-by-state figures -- reflecting February employment -- showed continued job growth in Florida and improving statistics in a handful of other battlegrounds, including Wisconsin and Oregon. But the job losses continued to mount in several other key states, especially in Missouri and Ohio.

“I don’t think a day of good news, or even a week or two of good news, are going to do the trick in Ohio,” said Eric Rademacher, co-director of the nonpartisan Ohio Poll, which shows Bush and Kerry running neck andneck in the state.

Added Rademacher: “The president really needs to see a sustained period of positive economic indicators that he can then bring to the state.”

Times staff writer Ronald Brownstein contributed to this report.