Obama's Job Creation Tightrope Walk

The new Obama campaign ad attacks
Romney's record on job creation.

The nation's jobless statistics for May were released last week, and the results were undeniably abysmal.

Forecasters had anticipated the creation of 150,000 news jobs in May, and instead, Department of Labor reporting showed only 67,000 jobs were added - a number so low it fails to even keep up with the nation's population growth.

The overall unemployment rate also rose for the first time in months from 8.1% to 8.2%, and numerous other economic indicators, like GDP growth, manufacturing orders, and auto sales also declined.

What does all this mean for everyday Americans? Essentially, it means we're no more fucked than we were last month, but we're also no closer to putting the last remnants of the Bush economic morass behind us.

As the general election in November creeps ever closer, the Obama campaign is most assuredly getting nervous over the serious slowdown in job growth. Early in the year, the economy, as well as the President's approval ratings, seemed to be picking up steam, but in the last two months the recovery has all but stalled out.

The President and his staff must walk an incredibly tenuous tightrope at this point. While it's true that President Obama inherited an economic disaster, he's been in office for three full years now, and the "we didn't start the fire" argument is no longer an adequate rebuttal to criticism of the President's failure to engineer an economic turnaround.

Democrats can continue to trot out the Job Creation Chart, and while the fact remains that private sector job growth continues to be positive (in the blue), the trend for 2012 shows each month in decline. Click to enlarge the chart.

In May, 82,000 private sector jobs were added (note: this stat doesn't reflect 15,000 public sector jobs that were eliminated). This job creation number is below expectations, but still far better than the 839,000 jobs lost in President Bush's last month in office. As the overall unemployment number grows, most Americans will perceive Obama's recent results as better than catastrophic Bush era figures, but not good enough.

With news of a second consecutive month of relatively poor economic indicators, and the increasing ineffectiveness of playing the Bush/Congress blame game, the Obama campaign has transitioned its focus to an emphasis on Romney's lack of economic success as governor of Massachusetts.

According to the new Obama campaign ad shown below, Romney, the self-proclaimed wizard of private sector business, was actually quite ineffective in the role of "job creator" during his time as governor of Massachusetts. During the Romney administration, the state of Massachusetts ranked 47th in job creation.

This ad does a good job of shedding new light (and casting doubt) on Romney's claim to have an insider understanding of the economy that poor President Obama "simply doesn't get." Until the economic news improves, the Obama campaign would be wise to continue this type of attack on Romney's record.

After all, if your candidate hasn't consistently produced the economic results that are expected, the next best strategy is to convince people that he's still more likely to get us there than the other guy.