Obama campaign spokesperson Stepanie Cutter, appearing on MSNBC earlier this week, claimed that "over the past, you know, 27 months we've created 4.5 million private-sector jobs. That's more jobs than in the Bush recovery (or) in the Reagan recovery."
A Thursday Investor's Business Daily editorial plaintively asked: "Where are those allegedly unbiased fact-checkers when you need them?" As will be seen shortly, the answer is "AWOL."
First, to debunk Cutter's lie (source: Bureau of Labor Statistics):
Thanks to the graph, yours truly doesn't need to bore readers with lots of numbers. Outside of very small blips, there is virtually no point on the above graph where the trajectory of job growth under Obama is as high as that seen under Reagan, even though the Reagan-era workforce was about one-third smaller. If done on percentage of workforce, the slope of the Reagan-era ascent would be even steeper.
For those who crave some numbers -- In its first 37 post-recession months, the economy under Reagan added more than 9.8 million nonfarm payroll (NFP) jobs, over 7 million more than the 2.7 million added under Obama. To replicate the Reagan-era performance, the economy under Obama would have needed to add over 14 million jobs since the recession's end; it has really added less than 20% of that. The Reagan-era private sector margin is over 5.7 million jobs.
And of course, there's an obvious point to be made about the unemployment rate, as IBD noted:
What's more, after 29 months of allegedly stellar job growth under Obama, the jobless rate is still 8.3%. By this point in the Reagan and Bush jobs recoveries, the unemployment rate was 7.2% and 4.9%, respectively.If we were one of those fact-checking organizations, we'd give Stephanie Cutter the "Lying Liar from Liersburg" award.
A Google News search done this morning on "Stephanie Cutter Reagan" (past week, not in quotes, sorted by date with duplicates) returned six items (the final result listed pre-dates Cutter's lie). The results are from American Thinker, Real Clear Politics (2), National Review, Washington Examiner, and United Liberty.
The same search at the Associated Press's main site returned nothing.
AP's "Presidential Campaign Fact Check" appears to be limited to what the presidential and vice-presidential candidates say. The wire service is currently carrying its interview with President Obama, naturally headlined "AP INTERVIEW: OBAMA CALLS ROMNEY'S IDEAS 'EXTREME'," on its "Top Story" page. Zheesh.
As to "fact-checkers" like PolitiFact and others, nothing demonstrates that they have turned themselves into just another tool of leftist bias than the "fact" that they haven't called out Stephanie Cutter's lie for four days and counting while trying and failing to nitpick the Romney campaign over its true statement about women's job losses during the recession several months ago. PolitiFact falsely claimed it was "Mostly False."
Oh, by the way, as James Pethoukouis noted in his second crucifixion of Cutter's comment (his original post relating to Reagan is here), "both the Reagan and Bush recoveries were stronger than the current recovery under President Obama."
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
