COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Obama, Romney, Jobs

... Greg Sargent is rightly outraged by Romney’s claim that Obama is a job destroyer:

Romney’s claim that two million jobs were lost under the Obama presidency is based on the idea that there’s been a net loss of jobs since he took office. In other words, Romney is taking into account the fact that the economy continued hemorraghing jobs at a furious rate after Obama took office — before Obama’s stimulus passed. But the figures show that once it became law, monthly job loss declined over time, and turned around in the spring of 2010, after which the private sector added jobs for over 20 straight months, totaling around 2.2 million of them.

Does this look to you like a president who “lost jobs”, or like a president who inherited an economy in free fall? You can accuse Obama of not doing enough to promote recovery — and I have (although the biggest villain here was Romney’s own party). But to claim that Obama caused the job loss is indefensible.

By the way, that wiggle in the upward climb represents the temporary hiring of Census workers.

Now, if you wanted a more credible case of a president who presided over job losses at this point in his administration, how about this?

And the truth is that I did give Bush a hard time over his job record — although I’m pretty sure I never accused him of destroying jobs, or even of bearing responsibility for the recession that began on his watch.