Of criticisms of George W. Bush on domestic policy, it might be the most startling:
He's likely to be the first president since Herbert Hoover to end his term with fewer jobs than when he began.
The Hoover comparison has been raised numerous times by Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry and in media accounts. It's likely to surface again today, when the federal government releases the final set of monthly employment statistics before the Nov. 2 election.
Economists expect to see decent growth, but not even the most optimistic think today's report will move the president from a net loss of more than 900,000 jobs to a net gain, dating back to when he took office in January 2001.
How did this happen? How did Bush preside over less job creation than Jimmy Carter, whose term was mired in double-digit interest rates and an energy crisis, or Ronald Reagan, who led during the Cold War and a much more severe recession, or Lyndon B. Johnson, who lacked the support to run for re-election but nevertheless finished the tumultuous second half of the 1960s with nearly 10 million new jobs?
Economists don't blame Bush for any particular action fueling job loss. The collective analysis is that his term was buffeted by an unusual convergence of events. "Bad timing," Haseeb Ahmed, a senior economist at Economy.com, called it.
Among factors that held down employment growth: productivity advances that enabled companies to grow without hiring, the 1990s tech boom that had fattened work forces to a level that was difficult to sustain, the terrorist attacks and recession in 2001 and the corporate accounting scandals in 2002.
"Every time businesses stuck their heads out of their turtle shells ... the next crisis came along and whacked them on the head," said Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors in Holland, Pa.
But Peter Morici, a professor at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, is convinced that Bush could have mustered a net gain in job creation if he had vigorously challenged China's economic policies. He contends that China's manipulation of its currency continues to drive down the cost of products there compared with the United States.
"The currency problem is the root cause of joblessness in America," said Morici, who notes that he's not impressed with Kerry's stance on the issue either.
The months of ambiguity before the fighting began in Iraq in March 2003 acted as another drag on job creation, economists said.
