Conventional wisdom (pardon the pun) holds that presidential election season doesn’t begin in earnest until the conventions conclude.<\/p>\n
If that’s the case, Barack Obama begins his job extension tour with a faceplant.<\/p>\n
Economists expected<\/a> our economy to add 135,000 new jobs in August, but today’s unemployment report shows just 96,000<\/a>.\u00a0 Not only is that a steep decline from last month’s already-lackluster 141,000 number, it’s significantly below the 200,000 per month<\/a> we must see to keep pace with population growth and substantively reduce the festering unemployment rate.\u00a0 Moreover, another 368,000 Americans simply dropped out of the workforce altogether in August, nearly four times the number of new jobs.\u00a0 Finally, the unemployment rate remained above the 8% level that the Obama Administration promised in January 2009<\/a> we would never reach in the first place, establishing a new record 43rd consecutive month.\u00a0 In fact, it promised that we would be down to approximately 5% by now.<\/p>\n “Four more years?”\u00a0 Today’s news makes that an increasingly difficult sell.<\/p>\n