Jobs, 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.

U.S. companies added 158,000 jobs in October, data from a payrolls processor showed on Thursday in a revamped report on the private sector labor market. The historical data for the ADP National Employment Report was revised as part of the new methodology, which was used for the first time in the October report. September's increase has halved to 88,200 new jobs from an initially reported 162,000.

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.

Companies added 162,000 jobs in September, more than economists expected but still pointing to slow improvement in the labor market, data from a payrolls processor showed on Wednesday.

No question about it, Friday’s jobs report was a disappointment ... But beneath the dreary headline lay some encouraging signs: Demand for labor was relatively strong ... Jobs growth is broad-based ... Workers are re-entering the labor force ...

"[B]usinesses have created 4.4 million new jobs over the past 28 months," the president said, "including 500,000 new manufacturing jobs. That’s a step in the right direction. That’s a step in the right direction. But we can’t be satisfied, because our goal was never to just keep on working to get back where we were back in 2007, and I want to get back to a time when middle-class families and those working to get to the middle class have some basic security. That’s our goal.”

Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt responded in a statement. “The President brought us back from the brink of another Depression but he doesn’t believe our work is done -- he’s got a plan to restore the middle class and create a million jobs now that Mitt Romney opposes and Republican leaders have blocked," LaBolt's statement read in part. "Mitt Romney says he has a better path, but over the past decade we saw where that took us -- to the slowest job growth since World War II, the collapse of our financial system and the deterioration of the middle class."