Bush's Job Creation Record

Steve Benin notes that although G.W. Bush's actual job creation record is 72,000 per month,,

Bush's monthly average, using the cherry-picked timeline, still trails Clinton, 172,000 per month to 237,000 per month.

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I'd only add that U.S. News recently asked Rudy Giuliani about this in an interview about economic policy. The magazine said, "The Democrats are going to say, 'We raised taxes in the '90s, cut the deficit, and the economy boomed.' Why not try and rerun the '90s instead of cutting taxes?"

Giuliani responded, "Because we have actually done more job creation by lowering taxes than by raising taxes."

Laughable. But also missing something I suspect is crucial - has anybody explored what percentage of the job creation on G.W.'s watch is directly driven by the Iraq war? If you were to reduce his job creation figures by the Iraq numbers, thus creating a "peacetime jobs" figure - jobs which will continue to exist after the war ends - is that not a better figure for comparison to Clinton's record? (And how good would Bush's "peacetime jobs" performance be?)

A war job "boom" paid for by government contracts and deficit spending - the Republican reality, perhaps, but not the image they try to sell to the public.