The Washington Post had a story today on how "Kerry Will Hit Bush Harder on the Economy". The article's lead:

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), dismissing economic and jobs growth as too little, too late, will step up his campaign accusing President Bush of saddling the middle class with lower wages and higher costs for health care, education and gasoline, top advisers said yesterday.

The Democratic nominee will paint a gloomy picture: the worst jobs performance since the Great Depression, an explosion of personal bankruptcies, skyrocketing bills for child care, health insurance and education, all piled on top of workers who are earning less or working more.

Sounds like a good approach to me. And, as the article grudgingly admits, Kerry, in doing so, will be generally factually accurate in his claims and reinforcing what voters actually believe about the performance of the economy under the Bush administration.

Of course, this being a standard mainstream press story, there is the obligatory attempt to show how Kerry will be lying to, or at least grossly misleading, voters, even as he is telling the truth:

But a recent spate of positive economic news threatens to complicate, if not contradict, Kerry's impending attack. The economy is growing at its fastest clip in 20 years, 1.4 million jobs have been created in the past nine months, including nearly 250,000 in May alone, and wages are starting to climb for many workers.

Well, there is no doubt that the economy, since the fall of last year, has done better than its truly deplorable performance throughout most of the Bush administration. But in their effort to be "balanced", the Post reporters rather deceptively present the economic data to make it sound like the economy's going gangbusters and Kerry has to wilfully ignore that indisputable fact.

But it is disputable. It is not correct to say "[t]he economy is growing at its fastest clip in 20 years". Rather, it's growing about at about 4 percent a year these days, which is quite ordinary, especially for this late in an economic expansion. What the reporters are apparently referring to was the annualized growth rate in the third quarter of last year which, at 8.2 percent, was indeed the highest quarterly growth rate since the fourth quarter of 1983. But that was one quarter nine months ago, not today. Well, perhaps it all depends on what the meaning of "is" is.

And what about "1.4 million jobs have been created in the past nine months"? But this figure is arrived at only by adding 6 months of pretty lousy job growth onto 3 months of pretty good job growth, so as to produce a figure of sufficient magnitude to sound impressive. I covered this deception in a previous post, but let me add a salient point here: the economy has to add about 140,000 jobs a month simply to keep up with labor force growth and prevent the number of unemployed workers from rising. And 140,000 jobs a month over nine months comes to 1.26 million jobs. Therefore, the seemingly impressive addition of 1.4 million jobs is just barely over the number of jobs the economy needed to add over that period simply to prevent the number of unemployed from increasing.

Doesn't sound so impressive that way, does it?

Finally, how about "wages are starting to climb for many workers"? Depends on what your definition of "many" is. Here's an excerpt from a recent article by economists Jared Bernstein and Dean Baker on The American Prospect website:

Back in the late 1990s, we recognized the unique nature of the first full-employment economy in decades and wrote a book to document the phenomenon. One of our observations was that fast productivity growth is a necessary condition for raising the living standards of working families, but not a sufficient condition. You also need very low unemployment to ensure that the gains are evenly distributed.

This combination of strong productivity growth and weak labor markets translates into wage stagnation for most, along with increased inequality. Full-time workers’ weekly earnings, adjusted for inflation, show a widening gap between the highest and lowest wages. For workers below the 75th percentile -- those earning less than the top 25 percent are earning-- real earnings grew by less than one percent. Only those at the top of the wage scale have benefited from the economic recovery, as real earnings at the 90th percentile grew 2.5 percent for men and 4.5 percent for women. These findings suggest that at least three-quarters of adult, full-time workers currently lack the bargaining power to press for a fair slice of the expanding pie. They are contributing impressively to this economy, but it is not returning the favor.

So rock on, John Kerry. Hit 'em hard and be confident your approach is both factually accurate and likely to be well-received in the court of public opinion. The Post and the rest of the mainstream press will never give you full credit for this, in their endless quest for a spurious balance. But in the end, the ones with the votes are the ones living in the real economy, not getting spun in the newsrooms.