In every US presidential election cycle, there's a moment when the economic debate slips over the line from oversimplified sloganeering and garden-variety pandering to pure, unadulterated nonsense. The 2004 campaign is now clearly past that moment.
What really kicked things off was an offhand comment by White House economic adviser Mr Gregory Mankiw that the "offshoring" of service jobs was part of the process of creative destruction that, in the long run, is good for the US economy.
Democratic presidential contenders Mr John Kerry and Mr John Edwards immediately seized upon Mr Mankiw's comment to remind voters that President Bush was the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a decline in jobs. Mr Edwards vowed to rewrite "unfair" trade treaties such as NAFTA, which Nr Kerry voted for, while Kerry railed against a tax code that encouraged "Benedict Arnold" corporations to ship jobs overseas.
Within days, the Republican speaker of the House gave Mr Mankiw a public thrashing, Mr Mankiw apologized and the president scrambled to distance himself from his adviser, declaring that something had to be done to create more jobs.
But things didn't end there. Taking the offensive, the White House and the Bush campaign apparatus began road testing the idea that all the job losses over the last four years resulted from a recession that was underway months before George W. Bush set foot in Washington. In other words, it was Mr Clinton's fault.
Meanwhile, the Democrats and their allies, having had the weekend to plough through Mr Mankiw's Economic Report of the President, howled over its forecast that the economy will generate 2.6 million jobs this year. That looked only slightly more ridiculous than last year's projection of at least 1.7 million new jobs - which turned out to be a loss of 53,000 jobs.
Almost immediately, the secretaries of commerce and treasury backpedaled, while the White House explained that it was only an educated guess that popped out of the economists' forecasting model back in December.
"The president is not a statistician," declared press secretary Mr Scott McClellan.
Mostly drowned out were the remonstrations of economists trying to inject some reason into this debate.
The ups and downs of the economic cycle, they explained, are largely outside the control of presidents, whose policies don't have much to do with how many jobs are created or lost.
And coming to Mr Mankiw's defence, they asserted that while offshoring may be responsible for some of the recent job losses, most of it was caused by a recession and a surge in productivity that has allowed businesses to increase sales without adding employees.
As for those forecasts, don't put much stock in them. With so much structural change going on in the economy, forecasting models are almost certain to be well off the mark.
That was true during the boom in the '90s, when job growth was badly underestimated, and it is proving equally true during this uneven recovery. - (Washington Post Service)
