John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama talk jobs

It feels sometimes like there is no news item that can't draw a prepared statement from a political candidate. And the new jobless numbers prompted John McCain and Hillary Clinton -- or, at least, some enterprising members of their staffs -- to toss out statements this morning.

We'll warn you right now there's not a whole lot of innovation here, mostly just using the moment to score already familiar points. And while Barack Obama's campaign didn't issue a statement, he wove the jobs report into a prepared speech in Indianapolis this morning. It's interesting to line them all up. First, McCain:

"Today's job numbers are another clear indication of the economic challenges facing our country. With Americans hurting, we must act to strengthen our economy for families and small businesses. We must help Americans now through gas tax relief, which provides immediate relief from rising energy prices. We must also help those facing home foreclosure by enacting a HOME plan. At the same time, we need to act to lower taxes, streamline regulation, lower health care costs, ensure energy independence and open foreign markets. To help those who have lost jobs, we must focus on promoting effective worker re-training programs.

"The wrong course for our country would be to follow Senators Obama and Clinton and their siren songs of higher taxes, bigger government, greater isolationism and a government-run health care system."

Mind you, the new numbers show fewer people out of work than analysts expected, and the unemployment rate fell a tick from 5.1% in March to 5% in April ...

signaling to some analysts that the recession they believe we're in is mild. And while first part of the statement is on point, we don't quite follow the logic on that "greater isolationism" thing. "Greater" is a relative term and implies here that isolationism already exists, which makes us wonder what all those troops are doing in war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as deployed to bases and ships around the world.

Clinton's statement ignored McCain and Obama and threw the blame for continued job losses on the Bush administration.

"Only in George Bush’s economy could the standard for analyzing the jobs report become 'it could have been worse.' Losing 20,000 jobs in April is completely unacceptable. It marks the fourth straight month of job loss, and means we have now lost more than a quarter-million jobs in 2008. This job loss is hitting families at a time when they are already facing record gas prices, record declines in home values and skyrocketing costs for everything from food to health care.

"We need a President who understands that a good job is the ticket to the American Dream, and who will fight every day for an economy that creates, not loses, jobs. That’s what my campaign is about: jobs, jobs, jobs and jobs. And it is why I am focused on providing struggling middle class Americans real relief right now, with extended unemployment insurance, a $30 billion emergency housing fund, and having the big oil companies pay the gas tax this summer instead of families."

The "jobs, jobs, jobs" line has become a mantra for Clinton, even if her campaign used to be about solutions and, before that, opportunity (see the last paragraph).

Obama paid relatively scant attention to the jobs numbers, using the report in a speech in Indiana as a lead-in to blast Clinton and McCain for the proposal to suspend federal gas taxes for the summer. Which is a bit of a non sequiter, but like the art of essay-writing in high school -- turn the question into something you want to answer -- he used some verbal acrobatics to move from job loss to tax hiatus to job loss, and blaming Washington for it all.

"This [jobs] news is troubling, but it’s not surprising because in recent months, we’ve seen the problems in our economy grow worse and worse. Now, a big part of why so many folks are struggling is that Washington hasn’t been looking out for them. For too long, we’ve had a politics that’s been more about scoring points than solving problems.

"We’ve had a good example of this lately, with the so-called gas tax holiday that Senator Clinton is proposing. At best, this is a plan that would save you pennies a day for the summer months; that is, unless gas prices are raised to fill in the gap, which is just what happened in Illinois, when we tried this a few years ago. Just this morning, there was an article in the paper about how the real beneficiaries of this tax holiday would be the oil companies, who’d walk away with billions more in profits. Meanwhile, unless you can magically impose a windfall profits tax on oil companies overnight to pay for the holiday, it could imperil federal highway funding, and cost Indiana more than 6,000 jobs."

So there you have it -- the top presidential contenders, the jobs picture and the rhetoric designed to make it all go away.

-- Scott Martelle