Obama faces another dismal jobs report

What happened

New figures showed the U.S. jobs market sputtering badly in May, damaging President Obama’s re-election prospects and stoking fears of a global slowdown. The Labor Department reported last week that payrolls for the month climbed by just 69,000 jobs, half the gain economists had predicted and the lowest uptick in a year. New jobs in health care, transportation, and manufacturing were more than offset by losses in the leisure and hospitality sector and in construction, which lost 28,000 positions, the industry’s worst month in two years. The already shabby jobs tallies for March and April were also revised downward, reducing average monthly job gains over the past three months to 96,000, versus 252,000 from December through February. And for the first time since last June, the unemployment rate ticked up, from 8.1 to 8.2 percent.

The report was an ominous development for Obama, who is locked in a dead heat with his Republican rival, Mitt Romney. “The president’s re-election campaign slogan may be ‘Forward,’” said Romney, “but it seems like we’ve been moving backward.” Obama admitted that the economy was not creating jobs “as fast as we want,” but vowed that it would improve. “We will come back stronger,” he said.

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What the editorials said

The Republicans own this slowdown, said The New York Times. Last fall, President Obama pushed Congress to approve a new $450 billion stimulus package. That plan would have created up to 1.9 million jobs by increasing state funding for teachers, cops, and firefighters and providing much-needed investment in infrastructure. But GOP lawmakers blocked the proposal, calling instead for more cuts in federal spending to reduce the deficit. “In the meantime, millions of Americans need jobs.”

Here’s more proof that we can’t spend our way out of this mess, said The Wall Street Journal. Despite Obama’s $800 billion stimulus and some $2.5 trillion of pump-priming by the Federal Reserve, “the weakest economic recovery since World War II has become weaker still.” The lesson of the Obama years is that stimulus money can provide only “temporary relief from otherwise rotten policies.” To get businesses hiring again we need lower taxes, less red tape, and most importantly a new president who understands how the economy works.

What the columnists said

Let’s not panic, said Paul Davidson in USA Today. Although it might not feel like it “for millions of Americans who are unemployed or whose wages are barely rising,” the economy is actually measurably better than it was three years ago. “Manufacturing is stronger, vehicle sales are higher, and a nearly moribund housing market is showing a stronger pulse.” Growth is far too meager, but at least we’re not sliding back into another recession.

That’s cold comfort for the president, said Paul West in the Los Angeles Times. Three incumbents have lost re-election bids since World War II—Presidents Ford, Carter, and Bush Sr.—and even they didn’t have to “cope with a jobless rate as high as Obama almost certainly will in November.” It no longer matters that Obama’s policies helped prevent a Great Depression, said John Cassidy in NewYorker.com, or that some 4 million jobs have been created since 2010. “The key to his fate is the trend.” Earlier this year, Obama could argue that the economy was turning around, and that he deserved another term. But with these miserable numbers on the table, “let’s be honest: Mitt Romney now has a good chance of being the next president.”

Maybe so, said Eduardo Porter in The New York Times. But what we should all be worrying about is “just how little sway” either Obama or Romney has over the forces most perilous to the U.S. economy. If debt-ridden Greece pulls out of the euro and the single currency collapses, global financial markets will plummet, wiping out the savings of many ordinary Americans. Our exports would also slow as Europe’s economies contracted, “depriving the United States of one of its few engines of growth.” The fate of our economy is as likely to be sealed by Berlin and Athens as it is by the presidential vote in November.