Yesterday, I reported on the latest NCB News/Wall Street Journal poll which, along with other recent data, highlights key role that economic anxiety is likely to play in this November's election. Today's Washington Post has a front page article on how the Bush economic team keeps making mistake after mistake in responding to voters' economic concerns.

Advantage Democrats. But what is to be done to turn this advantage into the maximum number of Democratic votes? That's where things start to get tricky.

Start with the idea that there is something very odd indeed about the current pattern of job loss and failure to create new jobs. Charlie Cook expressed it well in his March 9 column:

For almost a year, I have been on a tirade about the political importance of the jobs issue in this election, even before I saw an eye-popping August report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on the subject. The New York Fed study showed that during the twin economic downturns of the mid-1970s, 49 percent of the job losses were cyclical -- or temporary job losses -- such as letting a shift go at the plant. Meanwhile, 51 percent of the job losses were structural, permanent job losses. The study went on to show that during the next downturn -- in 1981 and 1982 -- the percentages were exactly the same, 49 percent were cyclical, 51 percent were structural. The 1991-92 downturn was somewhat different, with only 43 percent of the job losses cyclical, and 57 percent structural.

In December, the CEO of a California-based high tech firm told me that "there is no amount of overtime that we will not pay, there is no level of temporary services that we will not use, there is no level of outsourcing or offshoring that we will not do, in order to prevent us from having to hire one new, permanent worker in the U.S." As I travel around the country, meeting with business leaders, I hear similar, though less succinct thoughts in almost every sector and every part of the country. U.S. wages, health care, and other benefit costs have gotten so high -- and the press by investors for high stock prices is so great -- that the premium is on wringing every last bit of work out of as few employees as possible, to do anything but incur the costs of adding permanent employees.

If this description is roughly accurate, then this dynamic is going to be hard to counter by getting a bit tougher on trade, cracking down on "Benedict Arnold" corporations or providing a tax credit for manufacturers. Instead, it appears to call for a more direct role for the government in fostering job creation through direct spending (likely to be more effective in the short term) and socializing costs like health care and pensions that put US firms at a competitive disadvantage (likely to be more effective in the long run). Kerry does have some ideas along these lines--for example, his state tax relief and education fund, his energy independence plan and his plan to socialize and control some health care costs--but, perhaps because they don't lend themselves as easily to applause lines in speeches, we hear less about them.

That may have to change. A Democratic approach to job creation, in the end, has to sound like it would work. And my guess is that American voters will applaud the lines about Benedict Arnold corporations, unfair trade and the evils of outsourcing, but won't find them convincing as a way to create jobs. They will be looking for a more serious program that gets to the root of the current jobs crisis and the Democratic campaign has to be ready to give it to them.