Coming Up Roses? Steve Hayward, at the Ashbrook Center blog, slugs his jobs post "The Election May Be Over Today":

This morning's March jobs report is the worst possible news for Kerry. The consensus estimate was for 123,000 jobs; the wildest optimists thought it might be as high as 200,000. But the number is (drum roll please): 308,000. (And it is possible this might be revised upward in a few weeks.)

It's a good sign for Bush, to be sure. But Bush's campaign team has shown an uncanny ability to be handed first and goal, only to walk away with three points. Not a great winning strategy. If they can't go into the endzone (okay, I'll stop beating this metaphor) on 300,000 jobs -- in one month -- they don't deserve to win.

More: How can we tell whether the Bush team is using this issue well? When this kind of stuff disappears:

In his story March 26 on the likelihood that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice would testify again before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, Adam Nagourney of The New York Times wrote: "With the economy faltering and Democrats so united, Mr. Bush's terrorism credentials are portrayed by his supporters as the strongest assets he had going against Mr. Kerry." (Emphasis added. Link via RCP.)

Meanwhile, Scott Ott's fertile imagination conjures this response from Kerry:

In the aftermath of news that 308,000 new jobs were created in March, Democrat presidential candidate John Forbes Kerry said today that "corporate fat-cats are padding their payrolls with unneeded workers to help George Bush win the election." . . . "One must ask oneself whether these new jobs are real," he said, "since it is common knowledge that companies don't add more employees during a recession, but only during a recovery or in good economic times, and the latter scenarios are simply unthinkable."

Is this parody, or is Ott swiping the Kerry team's talking points?