With elections just a month away, President Barack Obama's re-election campaign celebrated a much needed injection of energy Friday from a drop in the jobless rate. Republican Rival Mitt Romney immediately pounced on the report from the US Bureau of Labour Statistics, which said the jobless rate had fallen to 7.8 percent - the lowest rate since January 2009, the month Obama took office.
"This is not what a real recovery looks like," Romney said, charging that the figure hid the millions of people who have given up looking for work. While candidates can argue endlessly over the interpretation of statistics, one thing remains true: the 12.1 million people still registered as out of work are a heavy weight on voters' minds as they go to the polls November 6.
Romney consistently speaks of 23 million people out of work, as he includes people working at part-time or underpaid jobs when they expect more. Romney also dismisses Obama's claim to having seen 5.2 million new jobs added over the past 31 months, pointing to the 600,000 jobs lost in manufacturing and charging that the 51-year-old Democrat's 2009 jobs stimulus programme had failed.
Romney vows to create 12 million jobs over the next four years if elected. That figure is, coincidentally, the same as that projected by major economic forecasters Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody's Analytics, regardless of who wins the election, The New York Times noted. On Wednesday, in the first of three televised Obama-Romney debates, the Republican said he expects strong job growth to generate more revenues in order to help pay for his controversial plan to reduce taxes by 20 percent while eliminating tax loopholes.
Obama blasts Romney's plan, saying it will mostly benefit the wealthy, further deepen the ballooning deficit and end up costing middle income earners more taxes in the lost deductions. Romney's official campaign website shows he has a strongly optimistic outlook on the US economy. In what he calls a "clear and realistic" goal, he projects US economic growth of 4 percent in the coming years.
That figure is much more robust than recent trends. Last week, the US Commerce Department confirmed second quarter US growth was 1.3 percent. In July, the International Monetary Fund lowered its expectations for 2013 to 2.25 percent growth. And the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office, which provides the basis for federal budget calculations, was even gloomier, projecting in August 1.7 percent growth for 2013 even if Congress avoids the so-called fiscal cliff of automatic spending cuts. If it goes over the cliff, the country can expect negative growth of 0.5 percent.
At a campaign rally in Virginia, Obama tried to seize on the jobs report and recapture the momentum lost after his listless debate performance Wednesday night. The jobs report, he told reporters, showed "that as a nation, we are moving forward again" compared to the 800,000 jobs a month being lost when he took office. Obama, 51, has steadily appealed for reelection, saying he's dug the country out of the 2007 recession and financial crisis. He concedes that there's still a long way to go but warns that electing Romney will return the country "to the policies that led to the crisis in the first place." Few US presidents have been re-elected with unemployment rates above 7 percent. The 7.8 percent jobless rate - the last figure to be released before election day - is the lowest rate since January 2009, the month Obama took office.
The jobs figure was good news for the president, said Luciana Gilmore, an Ohio high school teacher standing in the rain to get into an Obama campaign rally at Cleveland State University in the battleground state of Ohio. "It works in his favour," she told dpa. "He is doing what he needs to do." Romney, 65, meanwhile harvested a popularity boost after his aggressive debate performance Wednesday night. In the first poll taken since then, Romney notched into positive territory in two of three key battleground states after lagging behind Obama.
The poll, conducted by Rasmussen Reports, showed Romney leading Obama in Florida 49 percent to 47 percent, and in Virginia by 49 percent to Obama's 48 percent. Obama however still led in Ohio, with 50 percent to 49 percent for Romney. No Republican has ever been elected president without backing from Ohio, which holds a large number of state-by-state electoral votes in the final casting of ballots by the Electoral College.
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