The U.S. economy continues to lose jobs, and everyone agrees that more will be lost before we bottom out. Everyone except Barack Obama. In Obamaland, we’re not losing jobs at all. He’s creating them, as Karl Rove points out.
Mr. Obama has an ingenious approach to job losses: He describes them as job gains. For example, last week the president claimed that 150,000 jobs had been created or saved because of his stimulus package. He boasted, “And that’s just the beginning.”
However, at the beginning of January, 134.3 million people were employed. At the start of May, 132.4 million Americans were working. How was Mr. Obama magically able to conjure this loss of 1.9 million jobs into an increase of 150,000 jobs?
As my former White House deputy press secretary Tony Fratto points out on his blog, the Labor Department does not and cannot collect data on “jobs saved.” So the Obama administration is asking that we accept its “clairvoyant ability to estimate,” and the White House press corps has let Mr. Obama’s ludicrous claim go virtually unchallenged.
While its pretty clear that a majority of the American public are still hypnotized by The One, they won’t stay that way for long. In fact, I’ll venture to say that they’ll send a message to Obama on November 2, 2010, the same message they sent Bill Clinton in 1994.