Hope and Fail

Claiming job loss of a quarter million is ‘marked improvement’

Attempting to keep one’s head around the administration’s spin on the Recovery Act is a dizzying task.

During a short statement today in the Rose Garden, President Obama attempted to take credit for “marked improvement” in the economy — when the numbers show the country lost 247,000 jobs in June and the White House said, on the same day, that unemployment will likely hit 10 percent.

From the White House transcript:

Last week, we received a report on America’s Gross Domestic Product — a key measure of our economic’s [sic] health — and it showed marked improvement over the last few months. This morning, we received additional signs that the worst may be behind us. Though we lost 247,000 jobs in July, that was nearly 200,000 fewer jobs lost than in June, and far fewer than the nearly 700,000 jobs a month that we were losing at the beginning of the year.

How losing hundreds of thousands of jobs is a “marked improvement” is baffling. We must also note that the Gross Domestic Product shrunk as well, by 1 percent, but to Joe Biden and Barack Obama, this is good news.

According to the Associated Press, the administration says unemployment will still rise and the lower numbers are misleading because so many people have left the work force — meaning they’ve given up looking for a job:

President Barack Obama on Friday welcomed a dip in unemployment as evidence “the worst may be behind us” with the recession well into its second year. Earlier, however, the White House said that the president still expects unemployment to hit 10 percent sometime later this year.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the two positions don’t contradict each other.

“I would describe the report that came out today as the least bad report that we’ve had in a year,” Gibbs said. “But we still have a long way to go.”

The new Labor Department numbers show that employers cut 247,000 jobs in July, another job loss but also the smallest reduction of any month this year. The unemployment rate dropped marginally from 9.5 percent to 9.4 percent, although one of the reasons for that change is that hundreds of thousands of people left the labor force.

What’s more, in typical Obama fashion, he contradicts the measure of his own success in the same speech:

As far as I’m concerned, we will not have a true recovery as long as we’re losing jobs, and we won’t rest until every American that is looking for work can find a job. I have no doubt that we can make these changes. It won’t be easy, though. Change is hard — especially in Washington.

Apparently math is hard in Washington, too. As Ed Morrissey at Hot Air notes:

As far as he’s concerned?  As far as anyone’s concerned, Obama can’t claim political credit for recovery while we see significant net job losses.  In 2003, while the media and the Democrats assailed George Bush for his “jobless recovery,”, the US had a net gain in jobs — just not a significant jump, only 100,000 for the year.  And if Obama is setting the bar for success as a 0% unemployment rate, he’s giving his opposition a big bat with which to beat him in 2010 and 2012.

Exit question: How can the president take credit for the stimulus “working” when the White House said in July it wasn’t meant to actually stimulate?