Sort of a starting pistol this year for the 2012 Presidential campaign; it’ll certainly be anticipated all across the land, as many media reports about last night are going to need to know whether it’s going to be… well. It’ll either be slightly more cruddy than normal, slightly less cruddy than normal, or about as cruddy as normal – but that will have an effect on various front pages this morning.
I think that it was the Zero Hedge blog that noted that the President certainly knew last night what the BLS report was going to be this morning; it’ll be interesting to see whether he ended up telegraphing that and we didn’t see it at the time.
[UPDATE] Speaking as an American: …awwwwwww crap.
Jobs report +96K, below expectations. Unemployment rate down to 8.1% with almost 400k people having given up looking for work.
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) September 7, 2012
Some reactions:
Man, BLS just gave a killer response to last night’s State of the Union address.
— jimgeraghty (@jimgeraghty) September 7, 2012
That explains it.The President got an advance on the jobs report and it had to have thrown off his performance.
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) September 7, 2012
And one that has a special resonance for me:
DOOM. vlt.tc/ghi
— Ben Domenech (@bdomenech) September 7, 2012
Of course the President knows what the numbers are. And the numbers will be the news until next week, when the BLS quietly revises the numbers upward. Slight correction, you know…….
I suspect if the numbers had been substantially better than expected then we would have seen the cocky Barack. Last night, the speech felt more like a person resigned to his fate, not a lot fight in it. We will all know in about 10-15 minutes.
Pathetic – 96,000 jobs, if the US economy doesn’t grow at higher rates – we are all going to end up broke – worthless 401K’s – worthless home prices – BROKE and that’s the bottom liiiiiine because tnfriendofcoal said so….
He didn’t mention it, therefore, it is not better than expected.
On NPR this morning some expert or another said that we need 350k jobs a month for 3 years just to get back to 6% unemployment. ouch.
Mitt Romney is exactly correct in his speech: This president can ask us to be patient. This president can tell us it was someone else’s fault. … But this president cannot tell us that you’re better off today than when he took office”. This is what we should be trumpeting – it’s simple, it’s direct, it’s to the point and it’s 100% true. Oh that and Democrats boo God and Jerusalem and think they own us.
Are you sure it’s not time for DOOM yet, Moe?
Mew