The White House is expecting much-needed good news from the latest government jobs report, but Republicans were crediting temporary workers including census takers for anticipated gains.
“The only jobs that have [been] gained have been in the government sector,” said Rep. Kevin Brady, a Texas lawmaker and ranking House Republican on the Joint Economic Committee.
Much of President Obama’s prospects for helping Democratic chances in the November midterm elections depends on improvements in the economy, and especially on job creation.
A new USA Today/Gallup poll found 93 percent and 86 percent of voters respectively called the economy and unemployment their top concerns for November.
Health care, which Obama has been lingering over since passing a reform bill last month, ranked third with 82 percent.
At a health care reform event in Portland, Maine, Obama told supporters he shares their concern about the economy.
“I want you to know we are working every single day to spur job creation and to turn this economy around,” Obama said.
Stocks improved Thursday ahead of the federal government report, which some economists predicted would show the economy added about 190,000 jobs in March.
Even so, the administration was carefully managing expectations about the report, offering measured optimism about the economy.
“The unemployment rate is still terribly high and it’s going to stay unacceptably high for a long period of time,” Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told CNBC. “It’s going to take a long time to bring it down just because of the damage caused by the recession.”
At the same time, he said the economy “is getting stronger” and predicted a steady trend of job creation soon. The nation’s unemployment rate is 9.7 percent.
Cutting it both ways on the economy works for the administration because if the report is better than expected, the president benefits. And if the report is disappointing, they haven’t raised many hopes.
Republican leaders, however, were energetically issuing “pre-buttals” of the jobs report, noting that the Census Bureau is staffing up for the 2010 count, adding more than 600,000 temporary slots that are counted in the Labor Department statistics, but don’t boost the economy in the long term.
In addition, a new report by ADP Employer Services on the private sector jobs market showed a drop of 23,000 jobs in March.
“If President Obama were serious about job creation, he would be spending less time on the campaign stump trying to sell Americans on a health care bill … and more time focusing on putting our nation back to work,” said Katie Wright, spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee.
The party claims that since the health care debate began, the economy has lost more than 7,600 jobs a day.
“Unless the jobs report comes back and says that we’ve created 8.5 million jobs in the last month, the president is going to treat this jobs report the same way he’s treated the rest of them,” said White House deputy spokesman Bill Burton. “Which is to say we’ve got a lot more work to do.”
