Tom Blumer:
Republicans and conservatives frustrated with the GOP’s failure to nationalize this year’s midterm elections received a gift last week from, of all people, President Barack Obama. Going completely unappreciated is how his Department of Labor, particularly its Bureau of Labor Statistics, has from all appearances been conducting a de facto midterm election campaign with cooked unemployment figures for quite some time.
On October 2, Obama did the job elected Republican leaders up to that point had failed to do. Speaking at Northwestern University, he told his audience: ”I am not on the ballot this fall. … But make no mistake: These policies (of my administration) are on the ballot — every single one of them.”
Now that Obama has laid down the gauntlet, we can all better focus on national issues like the economy, which, even as serious international troubles mushroom, remains firmly in first place in importance in voters’ minds.
It isn’t there because they think it’s in great shape, but Obama does. He told a Labor Day audience that “by almost every measure, the American economy and American workers are better off than when I took office.” On Friday, his wife Michelle, pressed into campaign duty because the list of Democratic politicians who want to be seen with her husband is almost as short as the number of World Series triumphs by baseball’s Chicago Cubs in the past 106 years, repeated that claim.
The list of “measures” which are worse than they were in January 2009 is exhaustive — and, to those negatively affected by what all too many pundits insist is to be the malaise-filled “new normal” from now on, exhausting. Obama’s claim is so laughably false that the establishment press’s supposedly vigilant but actually protective fact-checkers have mostly pretended not to have heard or seen it.
The highest-profile metric to which the president can point as representing a degree of economic progress is the official unemployment rate. It dropped to 5.9 percent in the BLS’s Friday report, its last such pre-midterm missive.
A confidential source who is in a position to know has told me that almost everyone tasked with gathering and submitting the raw data the bureau uses in preparing the Household Survey, the underlying report which forms the basis for BLS’s calculation of the unemployment rate, believes that it should be significantly higher.
That this consensus in the trenches appears to have recently grown should not be surprising.
