Good reminder that, so far, there are two parts of the campaign, and Bush has leverage on both. Hence
http://mt.skybuilders.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/771
Last Fall Bush knew that the jobs number was going to be the weak "headline hammer". That is, the talking point that would hammer his Presidency as being bad for the economy. So, as with every previous problem, the important task of the Executive was to fix the headline problem. We live in a country divided - one with a right wing press that reads the headlines, and one with a press that is more ambigious that reads the body.
Creating jobs is simple: crude fiscal stimulus in the form of spending on Iraq does the trick, and since the Democratic Congress will not hesitate to vote for "defense", which is really a slush fund for Bush's re-election, that was the road to go.
However, money is like water - the pressure comes out someplace, and in our case it is coming out as commodity inflation. The jobs we are seeing are low quality jobs, generated by rising prices - people take more work at lower wages, which raises productivity artificially, because GDP growth is inflated. These "Phillips Effect" jobs turn the obvious job loss problem - Bush needs 6 more months of averagish growth to get to even for his tenure - into, what was hoped to be an unheadlinable problem of people working more and getting less. No factoid, no problem, runs the Rovian Reasoning.
