Unemployment Rate, Jobs Report | featured news

President Obama, Republican challenger Mitt Romney and their backers are stressing different aspects of today's jobs report -- the ones that bolster their respective campaigns.

... the last three months do suggest that the U.S. labor market is on an upward trajectory... whoever wins the presidential election next week will likely get to take credit for the recovery that’s now underway.

The presidential race enters its final month enlivened by two events with the potential to reshape the contest or perhaps negate each other. Soon after Mitt Romney's strong debate performance came Friday's encouraging economic news, not a minute too soon for President Barack Obama.

We’ve hit that moment in the election when people begin to lose their minds. Case in point, within minutes of the jobs report, Twitter filled with Republicans claiming the books were somehow cooked, the numbers aren’t real, etc. Let’s take a deep breath. Jobs reports are about the economy, not about the election. Confusing the two leads to very bad analysis.

Following an unexpectedly strong jobs report Friday showing unemployment falling to 7.8 percent and 114,000 new jobs added, conservative media figures and one prominent business leader quickly latched on to conspiracy theories about the veracity of the numbers. Call it jobs-numbers trutherism. And for the sake of historical record, its origin was a tweet from former General Electric CEO Jack Welch.