Steve Benen: The Death of Romney's Biggest Talking Point
The hard-working Steve Benen:
The death of a talking point: If I had a nickel for every time Mitt Romney has said the unemployment rate has been above 8% throughout the Obama presidency, I'd have, well, nearly as much money as Mitt Romney…. [T]he talking point [has] died. The unemployment rate… [is] 7.8%.
As we've discussed before, decreases in the jobless rate are not always good news -- the figure sometimes falls when discouraged Americans drop out of the workforce altogether -- but that's the case with the new data. The employment-to-population ratio went up, job creation went up, and the labor force went up. In other words, the drop in the unemployment rate is heartening, not discouraging….
In February 2009, President Obama's first full month in office, the jobless rate was 8.3% and climbing. As of today, it's 7.8% and falling.
Literally every day for a long while, Romney and his allies have said Obama must be a failure based on this metric alone. The Republican said in Wednesday's debate, "We've had 43 straight months with unemployment above 8 percent."
It's always been a ridiculous argument -- blaming Obama for the jobs crisis he inherited and helped alleviate is absurd -- but now it's also a bogus one.
Of course, the news also seems to lead to a follow-up question for Romney: if unemployment above 8% is proof that Obama should lose, does an unemployment rate below 8% prove that Obama deserves to win?
Live by the unemployment rate; die by the unemployment rate.
The thing I think that every American voter needs to focus on is that while Obama's plans to deal with the jobs crisis are inadequate, Romney's are disastrous: the policies that have sent Britain into a double-dip recession over the past 2.5 years.
