[It reached 10 percent in October 2009 and then fell only slowly, despite the billions pouring in from the government. Before last month, the rate had hovered between 8.3 and 8.1 percent. Obama’s advisers later said they had not understood the depth of the country’s economic troubles when they made their projection.]
For Mitt Romney, it was the number that proved everything. Since the very first speech of his campaign, the
Republican candidate has used a simple figure to bolster his argument that
President Obama couldn’t fix the U.S. economy: 8 percent.
In this campaign, begun in the midst of a staggering downturn,
monthly unemployment reports have been a running scorecard. They distill a vast
and complicated economy down to terms simple enough for a stump speech: a
number and a direction, up or down.
For Romney, any number above 8 percent proved he was right and
Obama was wrong.
Obama had promised, Romney told audiences repeatedly, never to let
unemployment get that high. Instead, Romney said, the jobless rate blew past
8 percent and got stuck there.
Until Friday.
The 0.3 percent dip in unemployment in
September, from 8.1 to 7.8 percent, deprived Romney of one of his central
campaign themes.
It was enough to put him on the defensive just as he was basking
in the afterglow of his debate performance Wednesday, the best moment of his campaign against Obama so far. It
wasn’t because the figures showed a healthy economy — they didn’t — but because
the economy had crossed a threshold that Romney had implied it would never
cross without him.
“We can do better,” Romney said Friday at a rally in the Virginia
coal-country town of Abingdon. It was the same argument he has
used throughout the campaign, but without the number he’d always used to hammer
it home. “There were fewer new jobs created this month than last month. And the
unemployment rate . . . has come down very, very slowly, but it’s come down
nonetheless.”
The political importance of the 8 percent threshold was
driven home, in a backhanded way, by a few conservatives who floated a
conspiracy theory that Friday’s dip had been engineered to give Obama a boost.
Former General Electric chief executive Jack Welch wrote on Twitter: “these Chicago guys will
do anything. can’t debate so change numbers.”
The Bureau
of Labor Statistics said the data were worked out the same way
as always, with no interference. And Welch later conceded that he had no
evidence of a conspiracy.
There is no special economic magic to 8 percent. A truly healthy
economy, experts say, would have a rate far lower.
“Eight is bad, 7.9 is bad, 8.1 is bad,” said Douglas
Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget
Office and an adviser to GOP nominee John McCain in 2008. “We want to be at
six.”
But the figure assumed its political significance in
early 2009, before Obama had taken office, in a report written by a pair of his
advisers, Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein. That report projected, with
caveats, that if Congress passed a large stimulus package, unemployment would
peak at 8 percent.
The stimulus passed. But the rate kept going up.
It reached 10 percent in October 2009 and
then fell only slowly, despite the billions pouring in from the government.
Before last month, the rate had hovered between 8.3 and 8.1 percent. Obama’s
advisers later said they had not understood the depth of the country’s economic
troubles when they made their projection.
The figure became one of the constants in Romney’s stump speeches
and fundraising talks: It meant that Obama had failed, even by his own
standards.
“We’ve had 43 straight months with unemployment above 8 percent,”
Romney said in closing in the Denver debate.
Obama appeared Friday at campaign rallies in Cleveland and at
George Mason University in Fairfax, evidently still smarting from his poor
performance in Wednesday’s debate. He seemed to be throwing out comebacks to
Romney that he wished he’d thought of on the debate stage back in Denver.
“Someone is finally getting tough on Big Bird!” Obama said,
responding a day and a half later to Romney’s promise to take federal funding from PBS.
But he was clearly heartened by the job numbers, citing them as
proof that he is the right leader to guide the economy.
“Today’s news should give us some encouragement. It shouldn’t be
an excuse for the other side to try to talk down the economy just to try to
score a few political points,” Obama said in Cleveland. “It’s a reminder that
this country has come too far to turn back now.”
The dip in the jobless number was caused, in part, by a surprising
jump in one measure of employment.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, a branch of the Labor Department,
uses two main sources. One is a survey of 141,000 businesses. The other looks
at 60,000 households, asking if the people in those households were working or
looking for work in the last month. The household survey captures data that the
business survey doesn’t, such as people who are self-employed or who work on
farms.
The September survey of
businesses indicated a relatively modest gain in hiring: Payrolls rose by about
114,000. But the household survey indicated a much greater boost in hiring,
with about 456,000 people no longer unemployed.
The number of newly employed people in that survey jumped by the
largest amount in nearly three decades. On Friday, economists said that it was
probably an exaggeration, an outlier made possible by a relatively small
sample.
“The numbers just seem too big to be real real.
But everything moved in the right direction,” said Chad Stone of the Center for Budget and
Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank. “These numbers really do jump around a
lot. You never want to read too much into one month’s unemployment data,
because the next month could look really different.”
The data for October will be released Nov. 2, four days before
Election Day.
On Friday, Welch’s suggestion that the numbers were fixed was
picked up by a few conservatives. The most prominent was Rep. Allen B. West
(R-Fla.), who posted on his Facebook page: “Somehow by manipulation
of data, we are all of a sudden below 8 percent unemployment, a month from the
presidential election.”
That assertion was denied by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which
compiles its reports in an intense and highly secretive process,carefully
guarding access to the data before the official release. The bureau currently
has no political appointees; its interim director is a career civil service
employee.
On CNBC on Friday morning, Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis said it
was “ludicrous” to suggest that the data have been manipulated to boost Obama.
“I’m insulted when I hear that, because we have a very
professional civil service organization where you have top, top economists that
work at the BLS,” Solis said. “They’ve been doing these calculations. These are
our best-trained and best-skilled individuals working in the BLS, and it’s
really ludicrous to hear that kind of statement.”
Later in the day, Welch told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that he had no
hard evidence that the data had been fudged.
But he said he stood by his suspicions.
“I don’t want to take back one word in that tweet,” Welch said. “These numbers defy logic.”
Rucker reported from Abingdon, Va. David Nakamura and Nia-Malika
Henderson contributed to this report.
