If Hollywood were scripting this presidential election, here’s what the next scene would be:
When the Labor Department puts out its monthly report Friday morning there would be a decline in the unemployment rate from the 7.8 percent announced unexpectedly last month.
The scene will be very dramatic because this will be the second surprise drop in two months. And since Wall Street isn’t expecting it, the stock market will rejoice and President Obama will ride a wave of euphoria to victory in next Tuesday’s election.
Roll the credits. Directed by Samuel L. (Foul Mouth) Jackson; starring Scarlett Johansson, Eva Longoria and Tom Cruise (all of whom, by the way, worked on this movie for scale) with music by Bruce Springsteen, the richest common man on the planet.
Let the partying begin. “Glory days…Thinking ‘bout glory days.”
Cut! I said cut! There’s a problem with this scene. It’s just not credible.
Hollywood, as you know, likes Democrats. I think they just like the party’s color — LA Dodgers blue.
So Obama is the movie industry’s man — just not as much as last time. Even Jackson is frustrated at how little energy is being put into the president’s campaign by people — in and out of Hollywood — who supported him last time.
Why is this happening? Well that’s an easy one to answer. It’s because the nation’s economy has sucked under the president’s guidance and because Obama doesn’t seem to have any new ideas on how to make it un-suck.
And let me tell you a secret. Come closer because I’m tired of all the screaming that’s been going on during this campaign: People really don’t care anymore if Obama inherited a bad economy or not. It’s a president’s job to fix problems, and he didn’t fix this one.
OK, I hear what you are saying. You think the economy is getting better. Last week’s report on third-quarter gross domestic product showed economic growth was 2 percent. And that was better than the 1.3 percent annualized growth in the second quarter.
There are two problems with this. First, 2 percent growth is lousy, especially since the figure is “annualized.” What that really means is that the economy grew at just very slow 0.5 percent in the third quarter. You get the 2 percent number by multiplying that 0.5 percent by the four quarters of the year.
None of us is going to get rich with that kind of growth. In fact, it’s making us poor. Real household income has collapsed during the Obama years. And most regular folks have been hurt even more by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s exceedingly lower interest-rate policy. It used to be if you couldn’t earn money with a job at least you could spend the interest your savings were earning. Well, not any more.
The second problem: The 2 percent annualized growth is suspicious. A lot of that growth came from defense spending and guess who has control over that? Right, the president. And we all know that defense spending can’t keep growing because we are broke.
Consumers also helped third-quarter growth — allegedly. But even if that turns out to be true once the figures are revised, you have to wonder how much of that extra spending came from inflation. Gas prices, for instance, rose during the summer quarter.
If consumers were paying more for gasoline and had to cut back on other things, then that’s not the kind of increase in spending that’s good for the economy.
So, you say, maybe Friday’s employment report will bail the president out. After all, the last report showed that the unemployment rate declined by 0.3 percentage points.
But a number of highly suspicious factors led to the decline in September, including (as I reported in a column) a huge increase in the number of college students who were expected to go back to college but kept on working.
That and other things fooled the seasonal adjustments in the report and gave the president some good economic statistics to chat about on the campaign trail.
Those hokey unemployment numbers are put together by the Census Bureau, which would be the least trustworthy part of government if Congress didn’t exist.
Could another statistical miracle happen in this Friday’s numbers? Of course it could. The monthly employment report is highly fallible even if the people who conduct the surveys are behaving themselves.
But here’s the main point in this column, and I’m sorry you had to wait so long.
Voters aren’t stupid. And they don’t like being played.
The question they will ask themselves is: Why is the economy suddenly looking better? Why — right before the election — are we getting so much good news from Washington when in our own lives we aren’t feeling it?
Voters don’t give politicians the benefit of the doubt on credibility. And if sudden good news looks scripted they will turn off the show.
Just ask the first President Bush, who completely misread economic developments in 1992. He said things were great, people knew they weren’t and they sent the president packing.
No matter what Friday’s numbers are, I still think Obama starts collecting his presidential retirement pay in January.