Campaigns turns focus to July jobs report

The presidential campaigns will be focused Friday morning on the release of the July jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Most observers expect the critical report will show employers added between 100,000 and 125,000 jobs for the month, not enough to significantly alter the 8.2 percent national unemployment rate.

The economy is the central issue in the election between President Obama and Mitt Romney, who argues growth over the last three years has been unacceptably low.

Romney on Thursday issued a report card for Obama that gave the president failing grades on the economy.

Romney contented that the president has failed at encouraging job growth, bringing down the unemployment rate and reducing the deficit — while as governor of Massachusetts, he had succeeded on similar metrics.

“The economy is not just downshifting, it's shifting into reverse,” senior Romney aide Eric Fehrnstrom said earlier on a conference call. “There's a lot at stake for the middle class, and it's shameful America has a sitting president who has offered no policy agenda for a second term.”

Each sluggish jobs report provides more ammunition for Romney’s campaign, though this summer’s poor figures haven’t led to a noticeable change in the polls, which show a razor-tight race in which Obama seems ahead in several key swing states.

Obama’s team argues the president inherited an economic mess, and has emphasized the fact that the economy is moving — slowly but surely — in the right direction.

He has also attacked Romney’s economic plan, including his support for extending all of the Bush-era tax rates.

During a pair of campaign stops Wednesday, the president cited a new report from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center that concludes a tax plan similar to the one proposed by Romney “would provide large tax cuts to high-income households, and increase the tax burdens on middle- and/or lower-income taxpayers.” On Thursday, the Obama campaign released a new commercial citing the study.

ADP Employer Services on Thursday projected that private-sector firms added 163,000 jobs in July, a slightly slower pace than June but a sign that the labor market is showing signs of life.

However, the ADP numbers have frequently been higher than the data released by the federal government, which also counts government workers.

The new jobs report follows by a week the Commerce Department’s estimate that the economy grew at only a 1.5 percent annualized rate in the second quarter.

No president since Franklin Roosevelt has been reelected with a jobless rate above 8 percent. Obama would love to see the figure drop below 8 percent, but many economists consider this unlikely by November, given troubles in the global economy.

—Justin Sink contributed to this story.

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