Jobs report boosts Obama; Romney not impressed

Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date, for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts Gov. Mitt Rom­ney ges­tures dur­ing a rally Fri­day in Abing­don, Va. (Asso­ci­ated Press | Steve Helber)

DAVID ESPO

KEN THOMAS

Asso­ci­ated Press

FAIRFAX, Va. — Mitt Rom­ney was still cel­e­brat­ing his widely praised debate per­for­mance when the cam­paign lurched in a dif­fer­ent direction.

Unem­ploy­ment dropped last month to the low­est level since 2009, and sud­denly it was Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s turn to smile.

In a race dom­i­nated by the weak econ­omy, Obama said Fri­day the cre­ation of 114,000 jobs in Sep­tem­ber, cou­pled with a drop in unem­ploy­ment to 7.8 per­cent, was “a reminder that this coun­try has come too far to turn back now.” Jab­bing at his rival’s plans, he declared, “We’ve made too much progress to return to the poli­cies that caused this cri­sis in the first place.”

But Rom­ney saw lit­tle to like in the day’s new gov­ern­ment numbers.

“This is not what a real recov­ery looks like,” the for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts gov­er­nor and busi­ness­man said, an analy­sis echoed by other Repub­li­cans through­out the day. “We cre­ated fewer jobs in Sep­tem­ber than in August, and fewer jobs in August than in July, and we’ve lost over 600,000 man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs since Pres­i­dent Obama took office,” Rom­ney added.

“If not for all the peo­ple who have sim­ply dropped out of the labor force, the real unem­ploy­ment rate would be closer to 11%,” he said.

Incum­bent and chal­lenger alike cam­paigned in bat­tle­ground states dur­ing the day, each man start­ing out in Vir­ginia before the pres­i­dent headed for Ohio and Rom­ney flew to Florida. Those three states, along with Col­orado, Nevada, New Hamp­shire, Wis­con­sin, North Car­olina and Iowa make up the nine bat­tle­ground states where the race is likely to be decided. Among them, they account for 110 of the 270 elec­toral votes needed to win the White House.

Recent polls have shown Obama with leads in most if not all of them, although the impact of Wednes­day night’s debate and of the drop in unem­ploy­ment could well change some pub­lic opinion.

Both cam­paigns kept up a tele­vi­sion adver­tis­ing war with a price tag approach­ing $750 mil­lion when out­side group spend­ing is included.

Rom­ney launched three new com­mer­cials dur­ing the day, one aimed at vot­ers in Nevada, a sec­ond tar­geted to Ohio and a third that says Obama claims “he is cre­at­ing jobs, but he’s really cre­at­ing debt,” run­ning up deficits and spend­ing unnec­es­sar­ily. “He’s not just wast­ing it. He’s bor­row­ing it and then wast­ing it,” the nar­ra­tor says.

The cam­paign did not say where it would air.

Romney’s strong show­ing in the campaign’s first gen­eral elec­tion debate cheered Repub­li­cans who had wor­ried about his cam­paign, and forced Obama’s aides into a rare pub­lic acknowl­edge­ment that they would have to adjust their strat­egy for the next encounter.

The jobs report was the main flash­point of the day, and Obama scolded Repub­li­cans for their reaction.

“Today’s news cer­tainly is not an excuse to try to talk down the econ­omy to score a few polit­i­cal points,” he said as Rom­ney and most GOP law­mak­ers empha­sized por­tions of the report other than the drop in the unem­ploy­ment rate to the same level as when the pres­i­dent took office.

Repub­li­cans made it clear they wanted to keep the focus on Wednes­day night’s debate, when Rom­ney appeared con­fi­dent as he pitched his case for a new approach to the econ­omy and Obama turned in a per­for­mance that even some Democ­rats con­ceded was subpar.

In a weekly “Week­end Mes­sag­ing Memo” dis­trib­uted by the Repub­li­can National Com­mit­tee, com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor Sean Spicer devoted 650 words to a recap of the debate — and made no men­tion of the drop in unemployment.

Posted by AP News on Oct 5 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.