Well, it's that time of month again: the new jobs report is out and the usual spate of news stories have ensued, making the pretty good job numbers (248,000 jobs created in May) sound way better than they really are and, of course, speculating that this allegedly torrid pace of job creation will wind up taking the economy issue away from the Democrats.

As I said in the May edition of this post: not likely. And for basically the same reasons that were well-summarized in Paul Krugman's May 25 column on Republicans' "Delusions of Triumph" on the economy. I reproduce key parts of Krugman's column here, merely updating the numbers to take account of the new jobs report. Everything Krugman said in his column remains dead-on, even with this extra month of job growth taken into account:

Let's start with the [1.2 million new jobs] created in the last [five] months. Is that exceptional? Well, during the first [five] months of 2000, the last presidential election year, the economy created [1.4] million new jobs...[1.4] million jobs [have been] created since last August (when job growth finally turned positive). But in [May] 2000, payroll employment was [2.6] million higher than in August 1999.

The experience of 1994 also gives us some indication of how likely job growth is to "redefine" an election. Between December 1993 and November 1994 the economy gained 3.6 million jobs, a number beyond the Bush administration's fondest dreams. Yet voters, convinced that Bill Clinton was leading the country astray, gave his party a severe defeat in that year's midterm elections. So it's interesting that a new CBS News poll finds that 65 percent of Americans believe that the country is headed in the wrong direction — a level not seen since 1994.

He concludes:

And employment is chasing a moving target: it must rise by about 140,000 a month just to keep up with a growing population. In [May], the economy added [248,000] jobs. If you do the math, you discover that President Bush needs about four years of job growth at last month's rate to reach what his own economists consider full employment.

The bottom line, then, is that Mr. Bush's supporters have no right to complain about the public's failure to appreciate his economic leadership. Three years of lousy performance, followed by [three] months of good but not great job growth, is not a record to be proud of.

Well said, Mr. Krugman. And for further explanation of voters' stubbornly non-elated response to these modest economic improvements, let's turn to a May 24 Gallup report on their "Index of Investor Optimism" and how it may be being affected by the Iraq war.

A more plausible explanation [for economic pessimism], however, might simply lie in the unusual nature of the current economic expansion. Although job growth seems to have improved during the past couple of months, we are still experiencing one of the slowest job-growth expansions in history. This has combined with the outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries to produce a great deal of job insecurity for the average working family. In turn, this overall insecurity in the labor market has led to a compression of middle-class wages.

Whether the overall economy is doing well or not, many Americans are experiencing a severe wage-price squeeze. As a result, it is not surprising that they are much less optimistic about the economy and the investment climate than many of their financially better-off counterparts. While Iraq may continue to dominate the headlines in the months ahead, it could be this wage-price squeeze that turns out to be the most important story as the presidential election approaches later this year.

These analyses are consistent with results of an ARG poll, conducted June 1-3, right after this allegedly spectacular month of job creation. The results show no lifting of the economic pessimism that is bedeviling the Bush administration.

Bush receives an economic approval rating of just 42 percent, with 53 percent disapproval, pretty very close to his 43/50 overall approval rating. (Note to horse race fans: the poll also shows Kerry leading Bush by 2 points, 48-46). Moreover, just 19 percent say the national economy is getting better, actually less than 27 percent who said it was getting better at the beginning of May. And only 27 percent say the economy will be better a year from now, a substantial drop from the 45 percent who were optimistic about the economy at the beginning of May.

Conclusion: the economic clouds over the Bush administration are not likely to lift anytime soon. And we're getting very close to the "lock-in" point in the election year where voters' views of the economy and the incumbent administration's handling of it become hard to change in time for election day, no matter how good the economic trends become.

In short, as far as the economy and the Bush administration go, the latest jobs report can reasonably be described as "too little too late", rather than as a harbinger of rebounding voter confidence.