Opinion

Bam’s jobs downer

The dynamics of the presidential race changed shape last week for two reasons.

First, neither Mitt Romney nor his staff made a gaffe following the victories that put the nomination in his pocket at long last — which suggests they may be settling in and getting more focused after a jumpy couple of months.

Second, President Obama and his staff were caught up short by a worrisome jobs report they didn’t expect — a report that demonstrates the degree of Obama’s vulnerability in November and the challenge the president may confront if he has to face the voters on Election Day with an economy little better than it is now.

The report indicated a significant deceleration in job growth after several months of encouraging data. Obama greeted the news with happy talk about the fact that 600,000 jobs have been created since December — which ignored the fact that the rate in March was half what it was from December through February.

His acknowledgment of the bad news was merely to say that, yes, “there will be ups and downs along the way.”

His allies and friends should not take comfort from such talk, since it was pretty much what he was saying during 2010, the year he wrongly expected his stimulus would turn things around.

Aside from being flip, the president’s words were also incorrect as a matter of fact: If there is a real and undeniable economic recovery going on as we speak, there shouldn’t be “ups and downs.” A recovery is ups without downs.

During a recovery, growth is pretty much across the board — real income rises, employment numbers increase, inventories must be replenished, more services must be provided, and all of this causes the economy to expand.

But as job growth slowed last month, so did income growth. “One very discouraging item in the survey was a 0.1 hour drop in the length of the average workweek,” noted Dean Baker of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research. “Wages continue to go nowhere. The average hourly wage has increased at just a 1.85 percent annual rate over the last quarter, which likely puts it behind inflation.”

The president and his people will trumpet the statistic that says unemployment has dropped to 8.2 percent from a high of 10 percent 18 months ago. But it won’t help them much.

The unemployment rate has declined in large measure because the number of Americans deemed to be in the work force continues to shrink. If the work force today were the same size it was when Obama took office, the unemployment rate would be well over 10 percent.

This is important not because it’s a talking point for anti-Obamaites but because it offers a more precise sense of the public mood. That is, data may suggest superficially that unemployment has dropped, but those data don’t reflect the reality of American lives.

In other words, what will matter to voters in November isn’t what the numbers say, but their own sense of how things are. The president might be able to shift that to some degree by projecting a sense of optimism about the future — but if he overdoes it and outraces their feelings, he might seem out of touch and slippery.

Without a recovery to ride like a surfer rides a wave, Obama will be compelled to find another path to victory — by making the choice of Romney as unpalatable as possible and thereby presenting himself as the minimally acceptable alternative.

That is why Romney’s gaffe-less week is important. Obama needs his opponent to make unforced errors; they let the president continue to fill in his paint-by-numbers portrait of Romney as too rich, too out-of-touch, too foot-in-mouthy, too extreme, too cowardly, too phony, too everything-and-anything not good.

Romney’s own mistakes are what give that portrait depth and color. He’ll make them; all politicians do. But it will make a difference how many he makes. And if he can keep the number low, the painful realities of America 2012 may well be his friend and Barack Obama’s enemy.