Jobs, Polls And Another Right-Wing Nervous Breakdown

ERIC BOEHLERT/Media Matters for America

Last week it was reported that the television networks and the Associated press this year will skip exit polling in 19 states. Picking states whose outcome are already considered predetermined, and therefore where polling isn't as important, the media consortium cited cost cutting as one of the key reasons behind the move. With more and more people voting early by mail (and from home), the exit pollsters have to shift their focus and spend more time and money contacting voters by phone, which is more expensive

Pretty straightforward, right?

Not this election season. Not when nearly every news cycle brings with it a new sinister conspiracy launched by the far right press, which remains desperate to explain why Obama's campaign hasn't yet completely collapsed under the weight of what they claim to be his historic domestic and international failures.

So on the same day the exit polling story was reported in the Washington Post, Breitbart.com's Big Journalismposted an item announcing that the elimination of the 19 exit polling states represented an obvious media-driven conspiracy (an "insidious plan") concocted by the "goose-stepping" networks and AP to help re-elect President Obama.

What was so evil about the cost-cutting move? Of the 19 states, 15 are red ones where Romney will win easily.

Therefore:

The real reason the consortium has cut these states is that they know that if they report fifteen states coming in for Romney early, independent voters in other states will take notice and be swayed his way.

The networks and the AP just knew that for independent voters who still hadn't voted at night on November 6, if early returns showed Romney had won Louisiana, Kentucky and Georgia, for example, that would prompt undecided voters all over the country to flock to the polls to vote for the Republican, because he'd won states he was supposed to win. (Just like they did with McCain in 2008?) Therefore, the networks and AP had to step in and cut off exit polling in key Romney states.

That's the basis for the Breitbart.com fantasy (announced as fact, of course) about how the media were conspiring yet again to aide Obama's reelection.

What's so remarkable is that that wasn't even the most delusional theory that was launched last week by the far-right press, which has transformed itself during the closing weeks of the campaign into a full-time, partisan fun house.  

As imaginative as Breitbart's exit poll scheme was, there's no way it could compete with last Friday's epic job truthers push by Fox News and the rest of the off-kilter far-right media. Without the slightest bit of evidence, Obama's media detractors suggested a truly vast conspiracy had taken hold inside the federal government in an effort to doctor the unemployment numbers and boost Obama's re-election run.

Why Obama allowed the supposedly malleable economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics to run up the unemployment rate to 10 percent in 2009 when all he had to do, apparently, was demand that they fudge the books, we may never know. But the far-fetched nonsense was thoroughly embraced by Fox News andthroughout the fevered swamps.  

Last week also featured the right-wing spectacle of a media movement throwing itself into a mini convulsion because the Drudge Report and The Daily Caller and Fox News decided to randomly hype a five-year-old speech Obama gave; a speech that was widely reported on at the time. Stepping hard on the race-baiting pedal ("Barack Obama Plays Race Card Against Whitey"), the GOP Noise Machine reveled, however briefly, in the fantasy that millions of voters would finally view Obama the way they have for four years, as a vengeful race hustler.

All of this comes in the immediate wake of the skewed polling nonsense, in which Obama's foes convinced themselves that basically all election polls were deliberately and improperly weighted in order to boost Obama's chances by projecting the false perception he was pulling ahead of Romney. In fact, they claimed, pollsters, like BLS economists, were purposefully skewing the numbers in order to suppress Romney's chances. Theory: If enough phony, skewed polls showed Romney trailing, fewer Republicans would bother to vote on Election Day.

For a movement that has spent four years sporadically clinging to the completely discredit claim that Obama wasn't born in America, this type of farcical behavior probably should not come as a surprise. And yet, lots of jaws dropped late last week when supposedly serious people (or at least people who take themselves seriously on TV), claimed an insidious plot of collusion had driven the unemployment rate down. ("Madness" was how New York Times columnist Paul Krugman described it.) This, just weeks after announcing all polls that showed Romney trailing the president were bogus and needed to be ignored.

I mean, who does that?

The bigger question is why is there a need for such elaborate schemes and conspiracies. Every four years a losing side emerges in the president campaign, but that losing side has never taken it upon itself to just make stuff up, connect invisible dots, and in general act like paranoid maniacs in effort to explain away their frustration.

The right-wing press, locked inside its airtight bubble, remains incapable of introspection or self-doubt. Instead,denial reigns.

That's because many of the media players who insist pollsters are working in tandem with the White House to juice Obama's numbers, or that the nation's unemployment rate is now fabricated, are the same ones who have spent the last four years deriding Obama's presidency as an unmitigated disaster. But if Obama remains in good position to win re-election, what does that tell us about the hysterical anti-Obama cries that have filled the air since 2009?

Unwilling to face those uncomfortable truths, the Fox-led brigade just keeps manufacturing one truly unbelievable explanation after another. (Pollsters are preemptively suppressing the vote!) Who knows what kind of absurd claims will be made during next four weeks of the campaign.

One thing is for sure though, this is what a collective nervous breakdown looks like.

Eight Veteran Economics Reporters Dismiss "Implausible" Jobs Numbers Conspiracy

JOE STRUPP/Media Matters for America

Veteran economics reporters and columnists are strongly criticizing conservative claims that the unemployment data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Friday was manipulated to benefit President Obama politically, calling such allegations "implausible" and "unfounded."

Shortly after the BLS announced that the unemployment rate had fallen to 7.8%, former GE CEO Jack Welch tweeted, "Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can't debate so change numbers." Welch's tweet was quickly highlighted by the Drudge Report. Since then, conservative media figures, including multiple Fox News personalities, have tried to cast doubt on the new jobs numbers.

But experienced financial journalists at outlets like The New York Times and The Economist say the contention that the new unemployment rate is fraudulent is not based on any valid proof.

"It is completely implausible to me that they would actively rig the thing to help Obama," said Joe Nocera, New York Times business columnist. "The guys are green eye-shaded career bureaucrats who have no particular vested interest one way or another in who wins the presidential election."

Nocera was referring to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which compiles the unemployment rates and has no political ties to the White House.

"They come out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, if you are going to cook them, how exactly would you go about it, it is pretty implausible that the career bureaucrats at the Bureau would cook the books for Obama," Nocera added. "Everybody likes a conspiracy theory, but it is hard to understand how they would do it."

Jesse Eisinger, senior reporter for finance at ProPublica and a former seven-year Wall Street Journal reporter, agreed.

"This is complete fantasy," he said about the claims of political influence. "It is yet another one of these right-wing denialist ideas. They're perennial ideas that government statistics are manipulated. These are flawed measures, certainly, but the flaws are not due to any partisanship ... These are done by reputable civil servants. There is almost no way that these numbers could be manipulated for political gain. It doesn't hold up in any way you think about it."

Martin Wolk, executive business editor for NBC News Digital, also called such claims baseless.

"I've been covering economics for a long time and I have been watching these reports come out every month and I talk to these economists and I think that those claims are unfounded," Wolk said in an interview Friday. "They do the best to present those claims honestly. I have never seen a pattern where the numbers consistently favor one party or another. I would defy anyone to find a pattern in those numbers that is politically motivated."

Added David Cay Johnston, a former New York Times economics reporter and author of many books on taxes and business:

"This claim gets made often. It has never been shown to have any basis in fact afterward during previous administrations."

Kevin Hall, McClatchy's national economic correspondent and president of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, called Welch's claim "mindboggling."

"This is a guy who is a business guru, he's a lion of the industry. For him to say something as outrageous as this without any substantiation, is kind of, well, my first thought was maybe his [Twitter] account was hacked," Hall said. "He is brash and outspoken, but what came out today is pretty outrageous."

Hall also said such claims against the Bureau of Labor Statistics impugn the reputation of a very trusted agency.

"It is really unfortunate because people already have distrust of government and politicians, and to take something that has been done for 70 years and is pretty set in stone and allege without any substantiation that it is somehow corrupt is pretty bad," Hall said. "If you understand how these statistics are compiled there is nothing new that is being done here. These are government economists."

Noting the political influence on the claims, Hall said: "This is the silly season, but there used to be some limit to what you'd say, some line you didn't cross and that is why this is so unfortunate. If you look at countries that do manipulate their numbers like China, we've had long-established practices of many, many years and no one has ever contested this as somehow fraud-ridden."

William Schomberg, economics and markets editor for the Americas at Reuters, also defended the statistics:

"The U.S. Government statistics office takes its job seriously and I have never seen any evidence that it is sensitive to any political influence."

For Greg Ip, U.S economics editor for The Economist, manipulation of the statistics is not a valid claim.

"I have been covering these reports for well over a decade," Ip wrote in an email. "I cannot recall a single instance of the data being manipulated by anyone outside the BLS or even a credible accusation of it. The process, in my experience, is carried out with excruciating professionalism. BLS makes mistakes but they are of the nature of what happens when trying to measure a gigantic economy with precision. I would add that it's funny to raise accusations of manipulation now. Where were they when the numbers the morning after Obama's convention speech were horrible?"

Steve Pearlstein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning business and economics columnist for The Washington Post, compared such claims to Nixonian paranoia.

"Richard Nixon was the last person who would claim that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was a political organization, and he was president at the time," Pearlstein said. "There is no evidence of it, these are just professional people who go to work every day, do their job and go home and are proud of the fact that they do their job and don't take any political direction from people."

He called allegations of manipulation "a slur and a libel on hardworking, dedicated and competent public servants."

Jack Welch Kicks Off Conservative Conspiracy Theories About 7.8% Unemployment Rate

by Tommy Christopher/Mediaite

The uninformed perceptions of the voting publicgiveth, and the uninformed perceptions of the voting public taketh away. After exactly one day of basking in the glow of a hideous-lie-powered victory in Wendesday night’s debate, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was dealt a blow Friday morning when September’s jobs report saw the unemployment rate plunge to 7.8%. Conservatives aren’t taking this lying down, led by Romney booster and former GE CEO Jack Welch, who tweeted thatthis is all the work of “these Chicago guys.”

“Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change numbers,” Welch tweeted, making the job of Romney surrogates that much tougher by calling them “unbelievable,” and causing a sigh of relief from the members of the bands Styx and Foreigner, who are actually the ones behind the conspiracy to cook the jobs numbers.

The jobs numbers for September really weren’t all that great, with 114,ooo jobs added, and upward revisions of the jobs estimates from July and August of 40,000 and
At an even more immediate level, the better economic news, coming so quickly on the heels of Wednesday’s debate, could significantly blunt the polling bounce that political observers will be looking for at the beginning of next week. If Mitt

Romney fails to significantly narrow the margin between him and the President, that debate victory will become a narrative liability. Even after such a clear and convincing debate victory, the narrative will go, Americans still won’t buy the Romney dog food. 46,000, respectively, but the number that sticks with the general public, the unemployment rate, crossed a monumental symbolic threshold. At 7.8%, the unemployment rate is at it’s lowest point since January of 2009, the month President Obama took office, and the first time it has been below 8% since then. Ironically Mitt Romney’s constant drumming-in of that threshold actually makes this milestone that much more powerful for President Obama, and reinforces the President’s argument that we shouldn’t vote for Typhoid Mitt just when the fever is breaking.

Given the huge potential benefits to President Obama, at a time when he could not possibly have needed them more, Romney supporters like Welch can be forgiven their suspicions, but conservatives would be wise (what are the chances of that?) not to follow Welch down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole, lest they be seen as a. crazy, and b. rooting against the success of the American worker. Romney and his surrogates should, instead, concentrate on trying to work the word “debate” into every sentence, twice, if possible. Maybe they could work it lie a variation of the fortune cookie “in bed” game. “Good morning, Soledad, it’s nice to see you this morning at the debate,” or “Excuse me, I gotta go take a dump at the debate.”

Today’s jobs report also offers the intriguing possibility that one of the reasons the President stubbornly played it so (disastrously) close at Wednesday night’s debate is that he had an inkling that unemployment would dip below 8% in a few days, and didn’t want to risk doing anything to mess up the political benefit coming his way. Maybe what he was really writing on the pad at that podium was “7.8%, motherf**ker. 7.8%.”

Some Good News: Highlights From The September Jobs Report

By Pat Garofalo/Think Progress

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today that payrolls expanded by 114,000 last month, dropping the unemployment rate to 7.8 percent. 873,000 Americans reported having found jobs in September (in the so-called household survey), the most since 1983.

This adds to the total number of jobs created over President Obama’s term; revisions released last week by the BLS showed that Obama is net positivefor jobs since January 2009. Here are some other highlights from the report:

– Labor force grows. The labor force grew by 418,000 people, so the drop in the unemployment rate was not due to people giving up on looking for work.

– Revisions shows stronger summer job growth. The number of jobs created in both July and August were revised up, adding a total of 86,000 jobs.

– Public sector finally stopped shedding jobs. State, local, and federal government finally ended a long period of job contraction, adding 10,000 jobs. Revisions show that the public sector created jobs in both July and August.

– Average hourly earnings rise. Earnings rose 7 cents to $23.58. Average hourly earnings have risen by 1.8 percent over the last year.

Of course, one month’s report does not make for a good economy, but the three-month average for job growth hit 145,000, a sign of a recovering labor market (albeit, one that is recovering slowly). Overall, the economy has added 1.3 million jobs this year.

The unemployment rate would be under 7 percent without public sector jobs cuts, while the American Jobs Act that Republicans filibustered in Congress would have added millions of jobs, according to economists.

How Today’s Jobs Report Deprives Romney Of Key Talking Points

Gadi Dechter/Guest Blogger for Think Progress

Today’s positive jobs report offers further proof that the unremittingly bleak picture of the economy that Mitt Romney has been painting — and which he emphasized in Wednesday’s presidential debate — is incomplete and inaccurate.

Employers added 114,000 jobs in September, and the unemployment rate dropped to 7.8 percent, going below 8 percent for the first time in almost four years. The economy has added private sector jobs for the past 31 months, totaling 5.2 million jobs over that period.

But you wouldn’t know that by listening to Romney, who in his initial reaction to the jobs report ignored the headline gains and dismissed good news for American workers as “not what a real recovery looks like.” Unfortunately for the GOP candidate, very real economic improvements continue to rob him of his best attack lines.

During last week’s debate, Romney declared, “We’ve had 43 straight months with unemployment above 8 percent.” Romney won’t be able to repeat that zinger when he and Obama face off again in two weeks.

Nor can Romney disparage the president for presiding over a term of net employment loss. Romney lost that line late last month when the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed that Obama is net positive for job creation, even after accounting for the president’s first few months in office, when the economy was still hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of jobs a month because of the Bush-era recession.

Even without accounting for those revisions, today’s job report bolsters net job creation under Obama, to 663,000.

To be sure, unemployment is too high and economic growth too slow to quickly knock the unemployment rate down to the traditional “full employment” rate of about 5 percent. But any balanced look at today’s report and at economic improvements in recent years suggest that the 2009 stimulus, the successful auto industry rescue, and landmark financial regulatory reform, have put the economy on a firm path to full recovery.

Jobs Hypocrite Romney in 2006: It takes Awhile To Get Things Turned Around

By: Ray Medeiros/politicususa

What Romney said in 2006 is completely different than what he is saying about the economy in 2012.

Watch here:

Romney said,

You guys are right to look at the numbers, I came in and the jobs have been falling like off a cliff and I came in and they kept falling for 11 months. (and) then we turn around and we are coming back. That’s progress!

If your going to suggest to me, the day I got elected somehow jobs are going to immediately turn around well, that would be silly. It takes awhile to get things turned around.

We were in a recession, we were losing jobs every month, we’ve turned around, and since the turn around we’ve added 50,000 jobs. That’s progress.

And there will be some people who say, well Governor, net, net you’ve only added a few thousand jobs since you’ve been in. Yeah, but I helped stop, I didn’t do it alone the economy is a big part of that. The private sector’s what drives that up and down.

But we were in FREE FALL for three years and the last year of that I happened to be here and then we’ve turned it around as a state, private sector, Government sector turned it around and now we’re adding jobs.

We want to keep that going to the extent we can. We’re the, we’re one part of that equation but not the whole thing. A lot of it is out of our control.

 It’s federal, it’s international, it’s private sector but I’m very please that over the last 2, 2 and a half years we’ve seen pretty consistent job growth.

50,000 new jobs created, some great companies, we’ve just had last week, Samsonite announced their headquarters moving here. Companies outside Massachusetts, moving into Massachusetts. That kind of commitment, that kind of decision, says something about what they feel about the future of our state.”

You can’t have it both ways, Mr. Romney. Either it takes awhile for the economy to grow or it doesn’t. In 3 years, President Obama stopped the 700,000 jobs a month hemorrhage and turned it into job growth consistently since 2010.

Considering what you have said in recent months, your 2006 speech was a lie. Or by your 2006 standards, your rhetoric against President Obama is lie. Which is it? Either way, you must have lied.

5 Ways Republicans Have Sabotaged Job Growth

By Jeff Spross/Think Progress

New numbers released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the economy added a mere 80,000 jobs in June. That’s down from an average of 150,000 jobs a month for the first part of the year, and far too little to keep up with population growth.

Republican intransigence on economic policy has been a key contributor to the sluggish recovery. As early as 2009, Republican fear-mongering over spending and their readiness to filibuster in the Senate helped convince the White House economic team that an $800 billion stimulus was the most they could hope to get through Congress. Reporting has since revealed that the team thought the country actually needed a stimulus on the order of $1.2 to $1.8 trillion. The economy’s path over the next three years proved them right. Here are the top five ways the Republicans have sabotaged the economic recovery since:

1. Filibustering the American Jobs Act. Last October, Senate Republicans killeda jobs bill proposed by President Obama that would have pumped $447 billion into the economy. Multiple economic analysts predicted the bill would add around two million jobs and hailed it as defense against a double-dip recession. The Congressional Budget Office also scored it as a net deficit reducer over ten years, and the American public supported the bill.

2. Stonewalling monetary stimulus. The Federal Reserve can do enormous good for a depressed economy through more aggressive monetary stimulus, and by tolerating a temporarily higher level of inflation. But with everything from Ron Paul’s anti-inflationary crusade to Rick Perry threatening to lynch Chairman Ben Bernanke, Republicans have browbeaten the Fed into not going down this path. Most damagingly, the GOP repeatedly held up President Obama’s nominations to the Federal Reserve Board during the critical months of the recession, leaving the board without the institutional clout it needed to help the economy.

3. Threatening a debt default. Even though the country didn’t actually hit its debt ceiling last summer, the Republican threat to default on the United States’ outstanding obligations was sufficient to spook financial markets anddo real damage to the economy.

4. Cutting discretionary spending in the debt ceiling deal. The deal the GOP extracted as the price for avoiding default imposed around $900 billion in cuts over ten years. It included $30.5 billion in discretionary cuts in 2012 alone, costing the country 0.3 percent in economic growth and 323,000 jobs, according to estimates from the Economic Policy Institute. Starting in 2013, the deal will trigger another $1.2 trillion in cuts over ten years.

5. Cutting discretionary spending in the budget deal. While not as cataclysmic as the debt ceiling brinksmanship, Republicans also threatened a shutdown of the government in early 2011 if cuts were not made to that year’s budget. The deal they struck with the White House cut $38 billion from food stamps, health, education, law enforcement, and low-income programs among others, whilesparing defense almost entirely.

There have also been a few near-misses, in which the GOP almost prevented help from coming to the economy. The Republicans in the House delayed a transportation bill that saved as many as 1.9 million jobs. House Committees run by the GOP have passed proposals aimed at cutting billions from food stamps, and the party has repeatedly threatened to kill extensions of unemployment insurance and cuts to the payroll tax.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, those policies — the payroll tax cut, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and discretionary spending for low-income Americans —have the highest multipliers, meaning more job boosting potential per dollar.

Obama Is Presiding Over The Fastest 6 Month Drop In Unemployment Since 1984

By Ray Medeiros/Politicususa

Fed-job-growth

The jobs numbers look good, but I tend to pay more attention to job growth rather than unemployment. I do this for two reasons. The unemployment number can be artificially low when people leave the workforce, and also it will jump as the economy rebounds and more people are active in their job search.

In the chart above from the Federal Reserve in St. Louis, you can see that President Obama’s private sector job growth has been progressing. That “U” shape is the shape of a private sector recovery. Look at the exact time period the private sector turned the corner. It was the first quarter of 2010, about 6 months after the stimulus took effect.

After each monthly jobs report I like to highlight two specific industries, healthcare and manufacturing. The healthcare industry in the month of January added over 30,000 jobs. I keep an eye on this, because this is the industry that is directly regulated by ObamaCare and the GOP keeps repeating that Obamacare is a job killer.

NEWSFLASH…if Obamacare is going to kill jobs, shouldn’t the first industry it kills be the industry it DIRECTLY regulates? Of course it should, but it doesn’t.

The second area I want to focus on is manufacturing. This industry did exceptionally well in January. Manufacturing added 50,000 jobs in the last month. That is a pretty healthy clip.

While the total number was 243K jobs created in January, the private sector ALONE added 257,000. The number that everyone is reporting adds into the equation, 14,000 layoffs in the public sector so it reduced the overall number.

Over the last 6 months unemployment has DECLINED at the fastest pace since 1984, when Ronald Reagan was president. If this keeps up and the Republicans do not try halt economic growth through austerity measures, President Obama will win by a landslide in November.