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Bush Gets Boost From Jobs Report

Elated by the strongest monthly job growth in four years, President Bush told several hundred applauding supporters Friday that the economy is growing and people are finding work.

"Today the statistics show that we added 308,000 jobs for the month of March," Mr. Bush said at Marshall University.

Added to the revised job numbers for the first two months of the year, Mr. Bush can now boast that 759,000 jobs have been created since August, reports CBS News Correspondent Mark Knoller.

The president, who led a discussion on job retraining, appeared in a state where Democratic officials have blamed him for the loss of more than 20,000 jobs within its borders and about 2 million jobs nationally during the past three and a half years.

The Labor Department said the nation's unemployment rate had edged up from 5.6 to 5.7 percent in March but that the economy had experienced a big jump in jobs. White House spokesman Scott McClellan called the jobs report "a powerful confirmation that our economy is growing stronger."

The president and Democrat John Kerry are tied among likely voters in West Virginia, according to a recent poll by the American Research Group of Manchester, N.H. Voter registration in the state favors Democrats over Republicans by a 2-to-1 margin.

Across the street from the president's motorcade as he prepared to leave were several hundred protesters, some of them carrying Kerry signs. One sign read, "Where are the jobs?"

"There's more we need to do," but "the policies are working," said Mr. Bush, who was making his seventh appearance in the battleground state since becoming president. Mr. Bush won West Virginia in 2000.

Reacting to the jobs report, Kerry said in a statement: "After three years of punishing job losses, the one-month job creation announced today is welcome news for America's workers. I hope it continues. But for too many families, living through the worst job recovery since the Great Depression has been, and continues to be, far too painful."

Among the proposals in Mr. Bush's "Jobs for the 21st Century'' program is $250 million in grants for community colleges that partner with employers seeking higher-skilled workers.

The president said the country needs to match job training with the jobs that are available.

"This is a time of transition," he said. "If you're one of the people worried about the transition we need to make sure there's a plan to help you. ... Technology's changing."

Unveiled in Mr. Bush's State of the Union speech, the overall jobs program would spend $500 million on job training and education programs.

Mr. Bush was heading to Georgia to thank some of his biggest campaign donors for their help in events closed to the media and public.

As he left Washington for West Virginia, Mr. Bush flashed a broad smile and a thumbs-up sign at the good economic news. In Huntington, he noted that the state's unemployment rate has fallen a full percentage point since July, to 5.4 percent in February. That figure was up slightly from the recent low of 5.2 percent in January.

The legacy of the Bush White House is that more than 20,000 West Virginians have lost their jobs since he became president, Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., wrote in the Charleston Gazette this week.

"Fewer jobs at home. No pension protection. No health care plan. Gambling the future of Social Security and Medicare," wrote Byrd.

But Republican chairman Kris Warner said West Virginia's biggest problem is "70 years of one-party rule by the Democrats."

"The jobs picture is not due to anything that happened with this president," Warner said. "We've been losing 44 citizens a day every day for the past three decades."

Warner said President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore talked about helping steelworkers for eight years "and did nothing. This president came in and laid out steel tariffs and gave companies the opportunity to pull together and restructure. It was a hundred times more than Clinton and Gore did."

Late last year, Mr. Bush lifted the steel tariffs, which were aimed at helping U.S. steel makers protect their markets from a glut of foreign steel. The tariffs were supposed to remain in place until March 2005, but the possibility of a trade war with Europe and Japan prompted Bush to scrap them.

West Virginia had the lowest labor force participation rate in the United States last year, 54.6 percent. Many people simply stopped looking for work and were no longer counted among the unemployed.

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