WASHINGTON -- The American job machine has jammed. Again.
And the political rhetoric machine is revved. Again.
The economy added only 80,000 jobs in June, the government said Friday, erasing any doubt that the U.S. is in a summer slump for the third year in a row.
"Let's just agree: This number stinks," said Dan Greenhaus, chief global strategist at the investment firm BTIG.
It was the third consecutive month of weak job growth. From April through June, the economy produced an average of just 75,000 jobs a month, the weakest quarter since July through September 2010. The unemployment rate stayed at 8.2% -- a recession-level figure, even though the recession has technically been over for three years.
The numbers could hurt President Barack Obama's odds for re-election. Mitt Romney, the presumed Republican nominee, said they showed that Obama, in 3 1/2 years on the job, had not "gotten America working again."
Romney, speaking ahead of the president in New Hampshire, interrupted his vacation to react to the jobs numbers.
"This kick in the gut has got to end," Romney said, and he issued a biting indictment of the president. "American families are struggling; there's a lot of misery in America today."
Obama, on a two-day bus tour through the vote-rich battleground states of Ohio and Pennsylvania, focused on private companies, which added 84,000 jobs in June, and took a longer view of the economic recovery.
"It's still tough out there," Obama conceded to a campaign crowd in Poland, Ohio. Still, he noted that the private sector jobs created in June contributed to 4.4 million new jobs in the past 28 months, including 500,000 new manufacturing jobs.
"That's a step in the right direction," he said.
Obama criticized Romney for pushing economic ideas that, the president said, have been tried without success before.
Labor treading water The Labor Department's report on job creation and unemployment is the most closely watched monthly indicator of the U.S. economy. There are four reports remaining before Election Day, including one on the Friday before Americans vote.
No president since World War II has faced re-election with unemployment at more than 8%. Patrick Sims, director of research at the consulting firm Hamilton Place Strategies, said that "time has run out" for unemployment to fall below 8% by Election Day. That would require an average of 219,000 jobs a month from July through October -- more like the economy's performance from January through March, when it averaged 226,000 per month.
Few economic analysts expect anything close to that.
"The labor market is treading water," said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. She called it an "ongoing, severe crisis for the American work force."
Robert Dye, chief economist at Comerica Bank, wrote Friday in his Economic Insights blog: "Today's jobs data confirms that the slowdown in hiring, first visible in March, has extended into the summer."
Michigan leads rebound State-by-state employment numbers for June are due out later this month. But Michigan has been recovering faster than the nation as a whole, its recovery led by improved automotive sales.
Earlier this week, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler reported that their sales in June were up strongly during the last seven to 10 days in June as automakers boosted incentives and Fourth of July sales kicked in early.
Overall in June, sales increased 20% for Chrysler, 15.5% for General Motors and 7% for Ford, the automakers said.
"A downshift in U.S. economic momentum, visible beginning in March, may take a little steam out of auto sales and production over the summer months, but this will not be enough to roll back recent gains to the Michigan economy," Dye predicted in his June report.
8.8 million U.S. jobs lost Nationally, June's dud of a number made it clear that the economy has fallen into the same pattern it followed in 2010 and 2011: It gets off to a relatively fast start, then fades at midyear.
Offering some hope, the slowdowns in hiring each of the two previous years lasted four months, and they were worse than this year's has been.
From June through September 2010, the economy lost an average of 75,000 jobs per month. From May through August 2011, the economy added an average of 80,000 per month. This year, the four-month average gain since March is 92,000.
But the U.S. is still reeling from the hangover of the worst recession since the 1930s. The economy lost 8.8 million jobs during and after the recession. It has regained only 3.8 million.
In the first three months of this year, it appeared state and local government job losses were coming to an end, said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial.
"That turned out to be a temporary halt," he said. "Apparently, there's no end in sight."
Friday's jobless report comes as the public's confidence about the economy was already wavering. The percentage of people in an Associated Press-GfK poll last month that said the economy got better in the past month fell below 20% for the first time since fall. And few said they expect much improvement in the unemployment rate in the coming year.
But Romney has not been able to exploit that sentiment fully. In national polls, Obama either retains a slight edge or is in a statistical tie with his challenger.
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