Yeah, I am sure you loved our Prez's challenge yesterday. You probably have read this also.
Democrats See Opening for Attack on Economy
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON - NEW YORK TIMES
WASHINGTON, July 3 - The jump in the unemployment rate gave Democrats a new opening today to attack President Bush's management of the economy and question the effectiveness of his signature tax cuts.
In strikingly similar terms, many of the Democratic presidential candidates attacked Mr. Bush's policies as misdirected and unfair. The continuing loss of jobs from the economy allowed them to call into question Mr. Bush's vow that his latest tax cut, the third in three years, would create a million new jobs.
"This president has a failed economic policy on his hands, and he has no inclination to be flexible and change it," Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, one of the nine Democratic presidential candidates, said in an interview. "He keeps doing more of the same thing he's been doing, which is more tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. It's a repeat of the Reagan program times three. It didn't work then, and it isn't working now."
White House officials said Mr. Bush was concerned about the rise in unemployment, and they said the economy's sluggishness showed he had been correct when he pushed through a $350 billion tax cut this spring, as he had been in signing the two previous tax reductions.
"The tax cuts have helped create jobs and to promote growth in the economy," Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, said.
Mr. Bush continues to be in an enviable political position, with high overall approval ratings, a loyal base and a huge fund-raising advantage. But for the first time, Democrats said, Mr. Bush is showing signs of vulnerability on both the economy and on his conduct of foreign policy. Some Democrats say the continued loss of American lives in Iraq, the failure to find any chemical or biological weapons and the general postwar chaos there have started to take some of the shine off the president's record as commander in chief.
At the same time, the economy is continuing to defy predictions that it will be turned around by the tax cuts and the Federal Reserve's aggressive interest rate reductions. The economy has shed nearly 2.5 million jobs since Mr. Bush took office. The growth in disposable income has been weak.
"The gap between the president's need to talk about positive trends in the economy and people's lack of income or job opportunity is explosive," said Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster.
A poll last month by Mr. Greenberg's firm found that Mr. Bush had a 61 percent approval rating. But 53 percent of the voters polled said the country should go in a different direction on the economy. And when offered two statements, one reflecting the Democratic criticism of Mr. Bush's tax cuts and the other reflecting the White House's argument in favor of them, the voters favored the Democratic position 56 percent to 41 percent.
A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released today found that 56 percent of Americans did not think the latest round of tax cuts would help their families' finances.
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, another of the Democratic candidates, said: "We'll continue to bang away. This will clarify as we move toward the primaries, and more important, when we choose a nominee. Then there will be a face-to-face confrontation with a president who will have to defend a record of losing millions of jobs."
The White House has already begun counterpunching on the economy, focusing on promises by the Democratic candidates to roll back Mr. Bush's tax cuts, a step his supporters say would be a huge tax increase that would stop the economy's recovery in its tracks.
Moreover, said David Winston, a Republican pollster, voters are not taking out their economic anxieties on Mr. Bush.
"This is a different electorate since Sept. 11," Mr. Winston said. "They're not looking to assess blame. They're looking for what you've done to correct the problem."
But Mr. Winston added that voters would be looking for improvements in the jobs situation by next summer. "In a major way, it's how Americans judge the economy," he said.
Mr. Bush's political fate may depend on whether the economy and the presidential campaign follow the pattern of the early 1980's or the early 1990's.
In Ronald Reagan's first two and a half years as president, the unemployment rate surged from 7.5 percent to as high as 10.8 percent and then declined steadily, to 7.2 percent, by the time he faced the voters in 1984. He won a landslide re-election victory.
In the first two and a half years of the first Bush administration, the unemployment rate jumped to 6.9 percent from 5.4 percent. But the rise in joblessness continued, peaking at 7.8 percent in June 1992, after the Democrats had settled on Bill Clinton as their nominee. Mr. Clinton attacked the first President Bush on the economy and beat him in November.
The current President Bush is betting that his experience will be more like Mr. Reagan's than his father's. The Labor Department's report today that unemployment in June rose to 6.4 percent, from 6.1 percent in May, put joblessness at its highest level since April 1994 and well above the 4.1 percent level when Mr. Bush was sworn in two and a half years ago.
But administration officials, Republican strategists and many economists say they are confident the economy will turn around, helped along by the tax cuts, and that unemployment will begin declining by next summer, when voters start to make up their minds.
nytimes.com |
