Hey, you know how you can tell it was a good jobs report? If GOP shills like Jack Welch start claiming the Labor Department cooked the books.

As Goldy points out, while no president has won reelection with unemployment above 7.2% since Roosevelt, no president has faced a global financial crisis on this scale since the Great Depression.

The Republican operatives like to say that under the "Reagan recovery" job growth was stronger, but they're not stupid. They know full well that the recession Reagan faced was kids' stuff compared with a financial crisis that, but for extreme measures by both the Bush and Obama administrations and Congress, would have been another full-bore Great Depression.

Are the Republicans literally lying when they try to pin the slow recovery on Obama? Suffice it to say they are now incapable of making an honest political argument considering all the false premises their arguments are based on. And in trying to respond to those arguments, you could spend all your time just peeling away all the layers of deception. (Look, I just tried to address one myth.) Bill Clinton in his speech managed to peel away all those layers; Obama hardly bothered--in his convention speech or the debate.

I've been trying to get a contractor for a short term job and the agency has only found 3 people. I explained the complexity of the job to one person and he never returned the agency's call and the other 2 boldly lied on their resume. Seriously, I cannot believe it's this hard to find people.

Also, no mixed race president has EVER won reelection.

There are lots of random presidential records out there.

Records were made to be broken.

One additional note.
"On the establishment side, by far the biggest job gainer was health care, which added 43,500 jobs in the month."
Didn't Republicans say nobody would want to get into Health Care because they couldn't make any money under Obamacare? Didn't they say Dr's would all quit and we couldn't get anybody to go to school for all those years to get into the industry? Didn't they say it would destroy the health care industry?

Where's the destruction? Where are the quitting Dr's? The industry seems just fine under Obamacare.

Surprise of surprises, the pundits had an inaccurate picture of reality...the only reason I have to believe that the economy is in the tank is the media, my on the street observations have never made me feel that way.

@3 - And "since FDR" is hardly a statistically significant sample. You know what else hasn't happened since FDR? An economic collapse of the magnitude Obama is dealing with.

What MacCroc said. The sample of presidents running for reelection after their predecessor destroyed the country comes down to basically the 1936 election. So truly meaningful statistics say Obama is home free.

We'll be coming out of the recession anytime from now to next quarter.

At the point the ground feels solid to business, it's off to the races on all fronts. Jobs, salaries, stock prices for consumer products go up.

Whether that happens before or after the end of October when people get their mail-in ballots will determine the winner.

@1 is correct. Even if al-Qaeda USA doesn't agree with the numbers.

@4 all the doctors are fleeing to Canada and France where they make less money.

On their unicorns.

"...no president since FDR has won reelection with an unemployment rate above 7.2 percent."

And exactly how many incumbent presidents have actually faced this situation? Seems like important information to include...

Auto sales are at a 4 year high and a mild housing rebound is clearing out some of the shadow inventory.

Expect a baby boom 6 months from now. There's a lot of pent up 'demand'.

It was 1984 when Reagan was the incumbent who won reelection with a 7.2% unemployment rate. Reagan analogies are popular with Republicans these days, and 2012 is looking a lot like 1984. Sorry Mitt.

Trollbait @9, you write (ever so elegantly),

They've never, I repeat for all ignorant dipshits, never had a valid method for taking an accurate statistical sampling of this ("discouraged workers just give up" bullcrap!), they just assign it to their assumptions, butthole!

Hate to break it to you, but just cuz YOU don't know about it or how it all works, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. (Shocking, I know!)

It's called U-6, and it's a measure of "total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers"

Those marginally attached and discouraged workers (aka: your "discouraged workers just give up bullcrap") are --as you could see if you followed the link above-- defined as follows:

"Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months.
"Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for work.
"Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule. "

And we've been measuring them in the unemployment survey* since the 40's, ya worthless ignorant dipshit!

* And note: it's a real survey ; they actually call households and ask if people are working or not, looking for work, discouraged from looking, etc. (see: http://www.bls.gov/cps/faq.htm#Ques2 )

See http://politicalwire.com/archives/2012/1…

Nate Silver: "Historically, there has been no relationship at all between the unemployment rate on Election Day and the incumbent's performance. However, there has been a relationship between the change in the unemployment rate in the months leading up to the election and how well the incumbent does.

(emphasis mine)

Yeah, well no presidential candidate in the history of the country has ever gone on to win the election after failing to medal in the dressage competition in the Olympics. So where does that leave us?

FDR won reelection in a landslide with unemployment at 15%... because voters vote based on the rate of change, not the level, of unemployment. If the jobs situation keeps improving slowly, Obama will probably win (though not in anything close to a landslide) even if the level remains high.