President George W. Bush today quickly tried to take political advantage of government data showing 144,000 new US jobs were created in August as he opened his post-convention drive to the election.
"We've overcome a recession, corporate scandals, a terrorist attack. Our economy is growing and it's getting stronger," Mr Bush told a crowd of about 20,000 at the Wisconsin Exhibition Center in this Milwaukee suburb.
It was a message he was carrying across three important states that he lost in 2000 - Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Ohio --on his first campaign swing after accepting the Republican nomination in New York with a speech promising to protect Americans against the threat of terrorism.
Pre-convention polls gave Mr Bush a slight edge in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and had him dead even with Democratic Senator John Kerry in Iowa.
In an appeal to swing voters, Mr Bush said: "This campaign welcomes all Democrats and independents. Our vision includes everybody. Our message is for every single citizen in this country."
The jobs numbers, while below market forecasts of 150,000, were respectable enough to give the Republican president bragging rights, and he quickly noted the US unemployment rate of 5.4 per cent was a point below the rate last summer.
Mr Kerry's campaign quickly argued the jobs figures fell short of what is needed per month - about 150,000 - to keep up with growth in the employment-aged population and keep the jobless rate from rising. Despite the new numbers, the US economy has shed about 913,000 jobs since Mr Bush took office.
"President Bush is now certain to be the first president since the Great Depression to face re-election without creating a single job," Mr Kerry said in a statement.
Mr Bush, whose economic policy is centered around tax cuts, said at a morning campaign rally in Moosic, Pennsylvania, that "because we acted our economy is growing again" and 1.7 million jobs have been created since August 2003 and more than 200,000 in the last two months.
The jobs numbers could figure prominently in the candidates' final two-month drive to the election because unemployment is a key factor in many closely fought Midwestern battleground states that the two candidates are criss-crossing.
Despite improvements in the jobs picture, the US economy continues to show signs of weakness. Overall GDP growth in the second quarter was a modest 2.8 per cent, which the Kerry campaign said was proof Bush tax cuts have not done enough to spur growth.