WASHINGTON - President Bush and Sen. John Kerry took their argument over the United States' economy to the airwaves yesterday, with the president asserting that the economy is on the mend and his challenger insisting that it was drifting overseas.
Bush and Kerry used dueling radio addresses to paint pictures of the economy that would serve their interests in the presidential campaign. And, with the economy emerging as a potentially defining issue in the election, the public's choice between the two versions of what lies ahead may be critical in determining the winner.
Polls consistently show that jobs and the economy are voters' top concerns and that a majority favor Kerry on those issues. With nearly 2 million jobs lost since Bush took office in 2001, Democrats eager for an area where the president is politically vulnerable have hammered him for months for having the worst job-creation record since the Depression.
As a result, Bush reveled for a second day in a Labor Department report showing the nation's employers swelled payrolls by 308,000 last month.
Bush hailed Friday's strong job creation figures as a "powerful confirmation that America's economy is growing stronger."
"Since August, we've added over three-quarters of a million new jobs in America. The unemployment rate has fallen from 6.3 percent last June to 5.7 percent last month," Bush said in his weekly radio address. "Over the last year, the unemployment rate has fallen in 45 of the 50 states. This is good news for American workers, and good news for American families."
For his part, Kerry, who gave the Democratic response, insisted that one month of job creation cannot compensate for three years of job losses and job flight overseas.
"For three years, President Bush's only answer on jobs has been tax cuts for Americans who are already earning over $200,000 a year," he said. "We now hear the administration claiming economic success. But the definition of economic success should not be losing 2.6 million jobs in the private sector.
"There is not a single month of this administration that has seen the creation of a single manufacturing job," Kerry said.
Bush said displaced workers are being retrained with government help for higher-tech, higher-paying jobs. And he said he would offer new proposals on job training this week.
