Terrible Jobs Report for Obama 2012
By Matt McDonald, (202) 822-1205, mmcdonald@hamiltonps.com
Today’s job report was bad across the board, missing the benchmark for the President to get to eight percent unemployment by Election Day, missing most analyst expectations, and putting an exclamation point on a week of bad economic numbers.
The survey of employers indicated just 54,000 jobs created after a string of decent months. The survey of households wasn’t much better with just 105,000 new jobs, and the unemployment rate rising to 9.1%. Additionally, the numbers were revised down for both March and April.
Interestingly, this is the first report in some time that has shown any significant increase in the labor force, with 272,000 new workers. Unfortunately for these new workers, there were more of them than there were jobs to be had.
Politically, this report is terrible for the President and will set the stage for continued speculation by the media on his economic vulnerability. This week has seen a number of stories on how the unemployment rate may impact the President’s reelection campaign: