The funniest AP feed I’ve seen in a long while:
The White House backed away Wednesday from its own prediction that the economy will add 2.6 million new jobs before the end of this year, saying the forecast was the work of number-crunchers and that President Bush was not a statistician.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan, asked repeatedly about the forecast, declined to embrace the prediction which was contained in the annual economic report of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
Unemployment and the slow pace of job creation are political liabilities for Bush as he heads into a battle for re-election. Despite strong economic growth, the nation has lost about 2.2 million jobs since he became president.
The jobs forecast was the second economic flap in recent days for the White House. Last week, Bush was forced to distance himself from White House economist N. Gregory Mankiw’s assertion that the loss of U.S. jobs overseas has long-term benefits for the U.S. economy.
Asked about the 2.6 million jobs forecast, McClellan said, “The president is interested in actual jobs being created rather than economic modeling.”
He quoted Bush as saying, “I’m not a statistician. I’m not a predictor.”
“We are interested in reality,” McClellan said.
Now they’re interested in reality? Fine, let’s talk about reality. The reality is Bush may not be a statistician, but he’s also not a leader who’s created any jobs in this country, despite promises to the contrary.
After scamming Congress into passing another tax cut for the wealthy in 2003, the White House, through its Council of Economic Advisers, projected that the plan would result in creating of 5.5 million jobs by the end of 2004 — 306,000 new jobs each month, starting in July 2003. They haven’t come anywhere close.
Indeed, the nation has lost jobs every year for three consecutive years — a unique feat not seen since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started keeping track of jobs data in 1939.
8 million Americans are out of work and hundreds of thousands more have stopped looking for work altogether. 2.3 million jobs have been lost on President Bush’s watch, the worst jobs record since the Great Depression. The best the White House can offer to explain why every guarantee Bush has made has proven false is that the president is not a “statistician”?
The White House must really be in trouble. Usually they can think of better spin that this.