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The unemployment rate under Bush averaged 5.3%, it’s been over 8% for the vast majority of Obama’s term.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney today came up with a novel way to spin the disappointing March employment numbers, which showed the economy created only 120,000 jobs, some 80,000 below expectations.

Here’s what Carney said on the way to Florida, where Obama will be creating jobs for his campaign organization by attending three fundraisers:

We talked a lot about jobs numbers on Friday, the fact that 120,000 jobs created, which made for the best quarter since 2006 in jobs created, came in under expectations, and there was a lot of discussion about whether or not that was a good number or a bad number.  The fact of the matter is under President George W. Bush, the average monthly job creation figure was 67,000 jobs.

Carney might think twice about using Bush’s job record as a foil for Obama.

It’s true that Bush’s job creation results were mediocre. But Bush did have a job creation record. Under Obama, the economy has lost more than 1 million jobs. And at this point after such a nightmarish recession, it should be pumping out jobs in the hundreds of thousands per month to give us any chance of getting back where we were under Bush

Apr 13, 2012 -- 11:33PM, JoeGNJ wrote:

The UE numbers SUCK! Get a grip lefties! How blind ARE YOU?

But they improved a lot according to Gallup. Last month you guys said we should use the Gallup numbers. This month the government numbers are more reliable?

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney explained that the number of people dropping out of the work force, which artificially depresses the unemployment rate, can be regarded as an "economic positive."

"A large percentage of that is due to younger people getting more education, which in the end is an economic positive," Carney said. "This increase in the number of people leaving the work force has been a trend and a fact since 2000, because of an aging population, which is not to say this is wholly -- that's not to say that I would wholly disregard as an issue." Carney had been asked about the 19 million underemployed or unemployed Americans, and about people who had left the work force.

This is reminiscent, of course, of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi's statement that "unemployment benefits" create jobs and that they are indeed the "fastest way" to create jobs.