WASHINGTON, July 2 (UPI) -- President Bush headed into the holiday weekend Friday by celebrating growth in the U.S. job market, but Democrats were quick to point out the market has contracted overall since he took office.
"We're witnessing steady growth, steady growth," Bush said of the U.S. economy in a White House speech Friday. "And that's important. We don't need boom or bust type growth, we want just steady, consistent growth."
Bush's speech built on a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Friday that 112,000 jobs were added in June and the job market has expanded by more than 1.5 million jobs since last August.
"To me, that shows the steady growth," Bush said Friday.
"It's one thing to be reporting the GDP (gross domestic product) numbers are up; it's another thing to be able to say more Americans are working. And that's what we want."
But Democrats on Capitol Hill and elsewhere said the president was ignoring key findings by the BLS. While the healthcare and transportation and warehousing industries experienced job growth in June, 11,000 manufacturing jobs were lost.
June's employment results also fell far below industry expectations. The job market was anticipated to experience increases in line with the growth seen in the last few months, but June's gains were less than half of the 235,000 jobs added in May and 324,000 in April.
Friday's announcement "falls far short of expectations," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement.
"While some Americans have found jobs, the nation is still experiencing a huge jobs deficit with nearly 2 million private-sector jobs lost since President Bush took office."
"The Bush administration is committed to talking about their record over the past few months. They're not interested in talking about their record over the past three and a half years," said Phil Singer, a spokesman for the presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.
"It's sort of like a football coach who goes in to the owner of the team and says, 'Hey, I want a raise, I want to come back next year, and I lost the first 14 games of the season but I won the last two.' But you still have the 2-14 record."
Despite attacks from Democrats, the Bush administration has defended its record and made its economic policy -- an area in which voters appear to trust Kerry more than the president -- central to its re-election the campaign.
The issue of economic growth allows Bush to tie together disparate elements of his platform into one speech. The president reiterated his call for healthcare and tort reform and called on Congress to pass his energy policy.
He lauded his education-reform efforts and his tax cuts as central to creating a good environment for economic growth and said his tax cuts needed to be made permanent.
Speaking in the White House's East Room Friday, Bush also focused on small-business owners, a constituency he has wooed in recent months, as the engine of economic growth.
Economic growth is "steady and strong because the American entrepreneur is strong and capable and willing to take risk," he said.
"The entrepreneur is employing more people. The entrepreneur is investing. And the role of government is to promote good policy that encourages the American entrepreneur."
Bush's speech followed a meeting with small-business owners, several of whom he pointed out during his speech as examples of the American dream.
"It's a great American story, isn't it, where somebody who has a dream and is willing to work to realize a dream is able to do so," he said after talking about small-business owner John Biagas.
"Our job is to make sure those dreams stay alive, the dreams stay alive."
Detractors disputed Bush's claim to be the champion of small-business owners. During his administration, funding to the Small Business Administration was cut by 25 percent and the position of head of the SBA was removed from Cabinet-level status.
Bush Friday also repeated his list of external factors he said are responsible for the recent recession: the terror attacks, war and corporate scandals.
The Kerry campaign, however, asserts the administration is responsible in part due to its "poor job" of reacting to the factors.
"Yes, these things occurred, but the White House has failed to pursue policies that address these problems in a comprehensive and viable way," Singer told United Press International.
"It's an oversimplification to blame external factors solely. Obviously those events occurred. It's a question of how you address those events. The White House has done a poor job of doing so."
One campaign official characterized the administration as "reluctant warriors in the battle against corporate fraud" and said that many of the entities involved in the imbroglio were connected to the White House.
The final argument against Bush's claims of success is that the jobs being created are of lower quality at lower wages than the ones that were lost.
Joint Economic Committee Vice Chairman Rep. Jim Saxton, R-N.J., came to the president's rescue in a statement Friday in which he asserted well-paying occupations constituted the majority of job increases in the past year.
"Most of the recent employment gains have not been disproportionately in relatively low-wage occupations," he said.
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