Obama's Awesome Recovery Will Doom Romney!!

That seems to be the attempted meme Obama surrogates are trying to spread. Today in the NY Times an op-ed (or maybe more accurately a blog post) makes such a claim. He provides a rather strange graph that attempts to illustrate this. What he's showing are total jobs created by each president - but for Obama only, he eliminates his first year. He then plots these total jobs on a graph (that has no numeric value on the X-axis) and proceeds to draw lines connecting the dots as if it were a time series. Rather bogus, I'd say - but the man is a History professor, apparently, so I guess we shouldn't expect him to be even minimally competent working with numbers.

Yes, it's true, Obama inherited a very dire situation, but that should have made it easier for him, not harder. When a recession is shallow (as in 2001 and 1991), you're not going to get very dramatic levels of job growth coming out of it. But when lots of people are thrown out of work in a deep recession, that's when you can make real hay on the jobs front. This is what happened in 1983 after the brutal 81/82 recession when unemployment exceeded 11% (it barely went over 10% this time around) - the economy roared. So let's compare Obama's recovery to Reagan's to see just how awesome this recovery really is:

Not even close. But it's even worse than that. Today, the population (non-institutional adults) is 36% greater than it was then - so job growth should be stronger. In fact, job growth hasn't even kept up with the growth in population. A look at job growth net of population growth is downright shocking:

There's just no putting lipstick on this pig - this is one ugly recovery.