The presidential politics of jobs

The latest employment report was bleak, presenting a picture of a sputtering economy, analysts agree: The jobless rate inched up to 9.1 percent last month, and only 54,000 jobs were added.

This, with the 2012 presidential campaign revving up.

But the economy, says Bloomberg Businessweek Senior Write Roben Farzad, has "never been great shakes to begin with. People forget the depths from which we've come back, from near collapse in the economy. We've never been generating, really, a baseline level, consistent 125,000 jobs a month, just to keep up with economic growth. When you step back from that, we actually need twice that number, over five years, just to dig ourselves out of this 9 percent unemployment hole."

He told "Early Show on Saturday Morning" co-anchor Rebecca Jarvis companies are sitting on $2 trillion in cash because they don't want to be left holding the bag if they spend it and the economy remains weak.

"You look at a company like IBM," Farzad said, "if it sees opportunities, and (thought it could take advantage of them by) going out there and hiring tens of thousands of Americans, it would, but it just doesn't. It doesn't see any sort of business proposition that would recourse back to the bottom line, so it isn't."

What's left, he says, is "a long, drawn-out painful process. We could have taken this in one, huge shot, as another Great Depression. But what we ended up doing instead was throwing trillions of dollars of stimulus money at it, and kind of taking the lumps over several years. No one ever said this was gonna be easy. The unemployment rate just doesn't double like that in a typical economic recession. So, I think people have to understand that these jobs -- you just can't defy the law of economic physics."

Spending lots more stimulus money, in a New Deal-like strategy, would be "incredibly wasteful," Farzad contended. "You're not getting bang for that buck because, unfortunately - the political realities ... you have to pay off congressmen. Congressmen have to deliver the pork to their districts. And you're not getting the bang for that buck. How many times were we using the phrase shovel-ready just two years ago? And where did that money go?

"But what makes this even more difficult going into 2012 is the Republicans don't want to give the Democrats the satisfaction of having another fiscal stimulus or monetary stimulus package. And the other way around, -- they're saying this should be about deficit reduction. We shouldn't be blowing another wad on, you know, mysterious things that we don't end up getting any sort of bang from the buck from."

So, he concluded, "It's a tough, tough, tough, tough period coming off of this huge economic crisis."

Democratic strategist Steve McMahon remarked to co-anchor Russ Mitchell that he's "not gonna sit here and tell you the numbers are good news for the president. I don't think they would say that in the White House, either. But I do think the president has a case for a second term, based on what he inherited, what he did, the growth in the economy to date, and it hasn't been perfect, and it hasn't been a straight line up. But 2 million jobs have been created since he became president of the United States. And this was no doubt a bad report and it disappointed everybody in the White House.

"But the question at the end of the day is going to be whether or not people feel like the economy is getting better around Election Day. President Reagan went through this ... and Ronald Reagan was (re-) elected with unusually high unemployment across America, because people felt like things were getting better. At the end of the day, that's what this president needs."

Economy's direction key for Obama in '12: expert

Republican strategist Ed Rollins told Mitchell his advice to the GOP nominee would be to go "out there talking every day about how, by being more fiscally conservative, we can create more jobs and make people in the business community reinvest a lot of the money that's just sitting there. No one wishes the president ill will on this particular front. We need to get Americans back to work. But at the end of the day, people are going to make a judgment over the four years, the trillions of dollars that have been spent under his stewardship -- does it deserve four more years? I think people still like this president. I don't think people basically think he's a leader at this pint in time."

Asked to size up the current Republican field, Rollins said, "(former Mass. Gov. Mitt) Romney now is perceived as the front-runner. He's a former businessman and a successful one. But I think someone will come out of the social conservative side, sort of the role of (former Ark. Gov.) Mike Huckabee might have had if he would have run; that may be (Minn. Rep. Michele) Bachmann, that may be (former Minnesota Gov. Tim) Pawlenty. At this point in time, we can't tell. A year from now, we'll know who the front runner is and who's the chaser."

McMahon said Rollins "handicapped it correctly. Mitt Romney has some credibility because he's a former governor, he's a former businessman. And he was a moderate when he was a governor of Massachusetts. He's also somebody, however, who ran businesses by cutting people and laying them off. So I'm not sure that's exactly what folks are looking for right now. And he's going to be challenged by somebody on the Right, which is going to drag him to the right, and make him a little bit less attractive to the middle as a result.

"So I think that, you know, there's a long way to go, and this is a marathon, not a sprint. The president understands that. I think the Republicans are gonna find that the road to the white house is as treacherous as the road to economic recovery. And I think you're seeing that a little bit already."

McMahon admits President Obama "is vulnerable, because of the economy, but I think he's not vulnerable on a lot of other measures. As Ed pointed out correctly, Americans still like this president a lot. And there's a number in (a recent) survey that's very important. And that is, does this person care about people like me? Two-thirds of Americans believe President Obama cares about them, and people like them. And with the Republicans in Washington trying to dismantle Medicare and make Medicaid a block grant, I don't think that they're helping their Republican nominee very much."

Rollins countered that, saying the key in 2012 will be, as Bill Clinton's campaign strategists put it, "the economy, stupid."

"And the critical ting about re-elections," Rollins point out, is that they're "about the incumbent. No Republican's gonna beat him alone. He has to basically be dragged down by his ineffectiveness at getting back to work again."