HARD SELL.Tony Fabrizio writes about a gap between "perception" and "reality." Those terms take me back -- as I suppose they're meant to -- to the old Rolling Stone ad campaign, targetting media buyers and meant to demonstrate that the boomers whom buyers might have written off as shiftless hippies were actually quite loaded with disposable income. (Perception was a crappy Volkswagen, Reality was a Mercedes, etc.) Fabrizio, though, has a difference dichotomy in mind:

At the national level unemployment is down to 5.6 percent from 6.3 percent one year ago. The economy is creating jobs at a steady rate and economists predict solid job creation through the end of this year...

But, despite the hard data on jobs creation, the voters aren't yet buying it. Therein lays the "gap" and the political challenge.

The signal difference between Fallon McElligott Rice's campaign and Fabrizio's is not that the former was trying to sell ad space and the latter is trying to sell Bush. It is that the Stone ads told their audience about a useful service they may have misperceived, whereas Fabrizio suggests that the voters have misperceived their own situation -- with the help of duplicitous Democrats:

The Kerry team, in contrast, is hoping it can keep as many voters as possible on board the Pessimism Express to the November elections. They can't attack the current job-growth numbers, but they clearly will try to muddy the waters by talking down the economy and talking up jobs lost since January 2001. And this makes the rhetoric over the economy a contest between job losses of the past and job growth of the future...

Put this way, it sounds as if Kerry et alia were engaged in negative advertising to wrench the buyer's loyalty from its current product of choice toward a new competitor. But negative advertising doesn't work if the consumer has no reason to be dissatisfied with the performance of his current choice. (Fabrizio should know: he worked for Bob Dole's attempt to unseat Clinton in '96.)

I think it's fair to assume that advertising would be different in general if you had to choose a deodorant every four years and stick with it. And it's just plain true that worries over employment and employability in any given community are a hell of a lot more crucial to voters than whether they'll be liking Speed Stick as much in '07 as they do in '04.

So hammering the dissonance between the national job numbers and what someone in, say, Columbus, Ohio thinks is happening to his local economy -- and himself, and his family -- doesn't necessarily mean that the Ohio native is wrong and should just trust the numbers or the experts patiently explaining them. The Economist may tell you that though job outsourcing means "individuals will be hurt in the process," still "jobs will be created that demand skills to handle the deeper incorporation of information technology, and the pay for these jobs will be high." But if you're a telemarketer with no hope of becoming a programmer or data analyst any time soon, and people are being fired all around you, you probably won't count yourself an unlettered dunce for worrying about it. And if the Wall Street Journal tells you that the Kerry campaign's claims of a decline in wages is "just the gap between wages and 'what they would have been given historical wage growth,'" your reaction to this news will be strongly affected by whether or not you see stores closing all around you, sick days cut, and prices and interest rates moving beyond your reach -- certainly more strongly than by WSJ's assurances that "the return of 'McJobs' rhetoric means that an [economic] expansion is in full swing."

Maybe we'll be rolling in dough by November, but telling people that prosperity is just around the corner isn't a winning strategy no matter how confidently you shake your slide rule as you say it.