WASHINGTON _ Throughout his campaign for president, Donald Trump painted a gloomy picture of the American economy, scoffing at employment data that he said masked the truth.
"Our jobs are being stolen like candy from a baby," the Republican said at an Election Day rally in Michigan. Gglobal competitors like China as outmaneuvering the U.S. economically, he said. "They take our money. They take our jobs. They build their plants. They build their factories. We end up with unemployment and drugs."
But his election as president seemed to change his _ and to some extent the public's _ outlook. The media-conscious president-elect has quickly adopted a role as a cheerleader for an economy on the rebound.
"The U.S. Consumer Confidence Index for December surged nearly four points," Trump said on Twitter this past week, noting that it reached a 15-year high.
Donning the mantle of economic optimist is a time-honored tradition for presidents. Trump's outlook, however, is notable for the reversal from the campaign and for his promotion of the unproven assertion that he is having a positive influence on the economy before he takes office.
The statistics Trump touts fit well into his view of a world divided into who's up and who's down, winners and losers. In place of the daily trickle of state and national political polls that dominated his campaign remarks, he has turned to consumer-sentiment reports and daily stock market closings for what he sees as his successes.
Like he did with polls, Trump has cherry-picked economic data. The Consumer Confidence Index did not suddenly rise after Trump's election; it has, like other indicators, trended upward since bottoming out shortly after the 2008 economic collapse. Its first major increase came shortly after the inauguration of President Barack Obama, and also rose similarly after his re-election in 2012.
Additionally, it is a volatile index, subject to negative pressure from political circumstance, most notably a 2011 battle over raising the nation's debt limit that pushed the country to the brink of a default.
Another key part of his economic message, touting new jobs as if he were singularly responsible for their creation, ignores that they usually resulted instead from efforts that had begun. already underway.
Wednesday, he trumpeted news that telecom company Sprint and technology startup OneWeb would hire 8,000 workers in the U.S. _ calling it "very good news" for the economy.
But OneWeb, which is building a network of satellites to deliver high-speed internet access, said nine days earlier that it expected to create nearly 3,000 jobs in the U.S. over the next four years after securing $1.2 billion in funding, mostly from Japan's SoftBank Group. And the head of SoftBank, which owns Sprint, had said Dec. 6 that the company had agreed to invest $50 billion in the U.S. and create 50,000 jobs here.
Earlier, Trump assumed credit for Carrier's decision to keep some of its workforce in Indiana in return for state economic incentives and an agreement to hold off on potential new import tariffs on its goods. The chief executive of Carrier's parent company, United Technologies, said conversations with Trump had helped spur the deal.
At an event in Iowa this month during his a thank-you tour, Trump touted the Carrier deal and said he's been calling chief executives of other companies who have planned to outsource jobs.
"We've had great success. You'll be seeing a lot more success," he said.
But by tying himself so closely to any economic good news, Trump risks bearing the blame for any downturn.
Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster who has conducted numerous surveys and focus groups since the election, said he has been struck by the changing attitude of Trump voters toward the economy.
"If you were a Trump voter, you really felt America was going to hell, and you were very skeptical that anything could be done to stop it," he said. "You're still skeptical now. But you believe that things have begun to turn around. It's like the rainbow after the storm. Everything's still wet. But you know that something better's coming."
That puts pressure on Trump ultimately to deliver tangible results, Luntz said. His supporters likely will give him time, Luntz said.
"I don't want to give the impression that they think happy days are here again. Because they don't," he said. "But they think now that something is listening."
Trump's boosterism is in contrast to Obama's more theoretical and analytical approach, said Matt McDonald, a partner at Hamilton Place Strategies and a Republican strategist.
"The working-class voters who rallied behind him, this is what they want to see," he said. "They want to see someone fighting not for a good policy environment where business can create jobs; they wanted someone fighting for their job at their factory more concretely."
Trump's cheerleading may be causing some consternation in the White House, where officials have long worked to claim credit for a slow and steady recovery since the 2007-09 recession, which bottomed out early in Obama's presidency.
Obama delivered his assessment in a letter to Congress delivering the annual report of his Council of Economic Advisers.
"Our economic progress over the past eight years has been nothing short of remarkable," Obama wrote.
The report touted a turnaround from monthly job losses of 800,000 to what the administration regularly notes is a record streak of job creation, with 15.5 million jobs added since 2009.
"It's all too easy to, in retrospect, see that as something inevitable and natural that just happened, but it was anything but," Jason Furman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said in December.
Furman also suggested that consumer confidence was a lagging indicator.
"People are essentially voting when they go into a store or when they decide whether to buy a house, and they're voting yes and voting their confidence in the economy," he said.
Some of Obama's efforts to tout economic successes backfired. In June 2010, Vice President Joe Biden heralded the start of "Recovery Summer" as infrastructure projects authorized by the 2009 stimulus were set to accelerate. The name Recovery Summer was ridiculed by Republicans as the unemployment rate still hovered around 9.5 percent.
"One of the biggest communications challenges of the entire Obama administration was balancing the glimmers of good news with the hard economic reality the American people have felt," said Bill Burton, a former Obama White House spokesman.
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(Times staff writer Jim Puzzanghera contributed to this report.)
