The White House trumpeted a 144,000 gain in August payrolls with 22,000 manufacturing jobs thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately, a hefty chunk of these were auto workers who returned after month-long retooling shutdowns just in time to get their pink slips. With car sales in the toilet, Ford and GM will manufacture 165,000 fewer vehicles than they did in last year’s final quarter and workers on the assembly line, as well as those supplying parts will soon be lining up for soup. With Bush inexplicably riding high, James Carville must be apoplectic.

Because, it’s not the economy, Stupid, after all. Last week, new claims for unemployment surged to 362,000, productivity slumped and retail sales came in lousy enough to make Intel look comely by comparison. Maybe it’s the Levitra, but Alan Greenspan still has a hard on to raise rates later this month despite a leaky technology sector and the patently unattractive results flashed by Wal-Mart, Sears, Limited Brands and Costco. The denizens of Wall Street, for their part, seem unconcerned with the impending tightening: the Fed will be chasing the bond market up the yield curve anyways, they allow, now that the Congressional Budget Office has affirmed a $7.4 trillion national debt on the back of George Bush’s record 2004 deficit of $422 billion.

All this, and the President is pulling numbers that make the election a forgone conclusion. Absent a cohesive message and feeling the heat, Kerry hastily replaced campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill with former Clinton hack Joe Lockhart. And for what? In the end, these ministrations will prove little more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Space Shuttle. With the death toll clearing 1,000 in Iraq, W.’s popularity surely can’t derive from the war. If not the economy, then what?

In a word, God. It was clear at the convention when the last day’s convocation likened any supporter of gay rights to members of Hitler’s inner circle. Not even Dick Cheney was exempt as his comments denouncing a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage brought a swift reprisal from the First Lady. With a gay daughter, Cheney disclosed, “it’s an issue our family is very familiar with.” People, he mused, “ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to.” The Veep then questioned, “What kind of official sanction or approval is going to be granted by government?” “None,” came the sharp reply from Laura Bush. “My daughters may be rum-swilling sluts, but I’ll be damned if they wear strap-ons and eat pussy like that awful k.d. lang.”

The President himself invoked the Almighty as he sluiced $2 billion in emergency funds towards his brother Jeb. After Charley and Frances, W. pushed Congress for “immediate response efforts to these recent disasters.” With Ivan poised to attack, Bush noted, “This is clearly the hand of God. The Lord told me personally that hurricanes would continue lashing at Florida as just long as black folks down there intend to vote.”

As if to fool the commonweal, the Right-Wingers and Christian Fundamentalists were squirreled away under the floorboards as Madison Square Garden was festooned with any manner of moderate Republicans, from Rudy Giuliani to John McCain and Michael Bloomberg. The biggest attraction was of course Arnold Schwarzenegger, who left California swearing to veto a bill granting driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants who pass a criminal background check. It is unclear how any aliens who by definition are in violation of immigration laws could pass the test, but, remember, in the land where a flashlight can shut down the country’s third largest airport, anything is possible.

The gropenator transfixed delegates with his rags-to-riches story, but sadly remained in the throes of what talent agents describe as the Travolta Syndrome. John Travolta has appeared in scores of films over the last thirty years, yet despite his enormous clout, he remains obliged to dance in every one. So it is for Arnie; he can’t get through a speech without referencing bad movie dialog or stale Saturday Night Live skits. His Republican homage was laced with I’ll-be-backs and girlie-men, although he did shine presidential with his lies of Soviet armor in his neighborhood. “When I was a boy… I saw their tanks in the streets. I saw Communism with my own eyes. I remember the fear we had.” He told a rapt audience that, “It was a common belief that Soviet soldiers could take a man out of his own car and ship him back to the Soviet Union as slave labor.”

Yeah. Except that the Austrian province of Styria, where Schwarzenegger grew up, was occupied by the British, as was neighboring Carinthia. The Red Army left those sectors in 1945, two years before Arnold was born. Like his role model, Richard Nixon, Arnold has become an exemplar of Republican rule number one: never let the truth get in the way of politics.