JOBS REPORT - NOT WHAT KERRY HAD IN MIND

Earlier this week Kerry hammered Bush for poor job growth. Today's jobs report was huge - including the January and February revisions, the economy has added 400,000 jobs or so in the past month (expectations were for 150,000 or so). To give you some perspective on that number, IBM and Ford each employ about 300,000 people.

The issue to my mind has never been jobs - the unemployment rate of 5.7% is at '95-'96 levels, nothing like a crisis level. The real question is the quality of jobs, and campaign rhetoric aside, I have not seen a good assessment of that.

[Correct - but because we are tallking about how people will vote based on their perceptions, the essential fear, family insecurity and anger isn't going away, even if we got half the number of jobs back lost in the last three years by November, which I seriously doubt (and keeping in mind another couple million job seekers are coming on the market). Polls suggest that the perception of Bush's economic actions as, oddly, benefiting the wealthy at everyone else's expense have been solid for at least two years, and a couple of quasi-boffo employment monthly statistics are no comfort at all to families trying to buy houses, plan for the future, or think crazily that maybe their kids will have a better life than they did. BTW, as you probably have guessed, the number of new U.S. Computer Science majors has plummeted. -PWP]