Jobs became the focal issue on the campaign trail in South Carolina this week after the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the state's unemployment rate rose to 7 percent in July.

That's the highest it has been since reaching 7.2 percent in March 1994. It's higher than the national average of 6.2 percent. Blue-collar jobs in manufacturing, retail and trade professions were among the hardest hit.

News of the increase led Democrats to pounce, saying the trend is a direct result of Bush's policies and that job losses are reaching every corner of the country, including states that are supposedly Bush-safe.

"More than 65,000 South Carolinians have lost their jobs since George Bush took office, and his economic plan doesn't give those workers any reason for hope," warned Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who is bringing "Joe's Jobs Tour" to Spartanburg next week.

"President Bush inherited a low unemployment rate, surpluses as far as the eye could see and America's strongest economy in 50 years, and his legacy will be epidemic job loss," added congressman Dick Gephardt of Missouri.

Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, who made his first visit as a candidate to Charleston on Friday, echoed the rest of the field, contending, "We simply must reverse the economic priorities of the current administration."

Even some die-hard South Carolina Republicans are showing signs of turning on the president, uttering what many would consider heresy, tying the bleak economy to three years of Bush in the White House.

"It's like a desert right now as far as economic development prospects in South Carolina," said Charleston lawyer Sam Howell, a Republican and former member of the state Election Commission who was at Graham's event in Charleston. "If it weren't for the home builders, I don't think the economy would continue."

Howell said Bush's tax cuts have been a disaster for South Carolina, a state where manufacturing and retail jobs pay much better than the hourly tourism jobs that most voters in the Charleston region see.

"It's more money for Wall Street and for the wealthy," Howell said of Bush's plan. "Wage earners, they get peanuts."

Statewide, South Carolina's unemployment picture floats between high and low from region to region. While it hovers around the 5 percent level in the Charleston metro area, it runs as high as 13 percent in the Pee Dee. The numbers go above 20 percent in some of the state's rural poor counties and have for some time.

Graham, and virtually every Democrat who has come to South Carolina to stump, has endorsed doing away with the administration's tax cuts as a first step to economic recovery, saying the cuts have failed to reignite the economy as Bush promised. The tax cuts also have flipped the federal government's surplus that was achieved during the Clinton White House to a deficit that is expected to climb to $455 billion this year.

South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Katon Dawson called the increase a serious problem but pegged much of the blame for the unemployment figures on the Clinton administration and former Gov. Jim Hodges.

"These problems didn't happen overnight," Dawson said, adding that Republicans should stick with the president. Dawson predicted a turnaround will come. "We're encouraged with the policies of tax cuts and giving people back more of their money to spend."

Few political watchers are predicting that a Democrat has a chance of carrying South Carolina in the 2004 race, considering the state hasn't voted Democrat since Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976. And for now, some political scientists are siding with the Republicans in saying that unemployment figures alone won't be enough to put South Carolina in danger of turning on Bush.

"You'd have to have a series of catastrophes in the Bush administration before South Carolina will be put in play," said Furman University political scientist Jim Guth. Most of those voters affected by job layoffs in manufacturing are blue collar blacks and whites, Guth added, the latter of which have been the slowest white demographic group to move into the Republican Party fold.

There will be some erosion of Bush support that will be tied to job loss during the next few months, Guth said, "but not a whole lot."

S.C. Democratic Party Chairman Joe Erwin said the state may not go against Bush over jobs in the 2004 election, but he said increased unemployment figures could play a role in other elections and would help the Democratic candidate in the 2004 Senate race to fill Fritz Hollings' seat.

Criticism of Bush's jobs policy this week came from nearly everyone running ahead of the state's first-in-the-South Feb. 3 Democratic presidential primary. Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina also became the first Democrat to run TV ads in South Carolina this week. One of those ads is titled "Jobs."

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