Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley Misleads on Jobs Numbers
Maryland Governor (and chair of the Democratic Governors Association) Martin O'Malley appeared on NBC's Meet the Press this morning to debate with Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell (chair of the Republican Governors Association) about the current state of the Presidential campaign. During most of the debate I was a bit bored as both men discussed the "chains" gaffe made by VP Joe Biden and what a bold choice Paul Ryan is for the GOP Vice-President with Mitt Romney. However, my ears perked up when I heard O'Malley say:
There were more jobs created last year in our country during the entire presidency of George W. Bush. More jobs created the year before than during the entire presidency of George Bush.
See, that doesn't make sense to me - wouldn't it make more sense (if the statement were true) to say that more jobs were created by Obama in the past two years than during the whole of Bush's presidency?
So I decided to look into it. O'Malley never made any distinction as to whether it was just private sector jobs considered in his statement or ALL jobs. It didn't take long in my search for his "facts" to find the source. What he said was a talking-point from the Liberal website Think Progress:
This morning, the Labor Department released its employment data for December, showing that the U.S. economy ended the year by adding 113,000 private sector jobs, knocking the unemployment rate down sharply from 9.8 percent to 9.4 percent - its lowest rate since July 2009.[...]Responding the jobs report, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) noted that President Obama and the Democratic Congress have created “more jobs in 2010 than President Bush did over eight years.”
[Source]
Now I don't trust Nancy Pelosi one iota. But I don't know enough about O'Malley to judge his credability, so I did a bit more searching. FactCheck.org posted an article just last month debunking false statements made by DNC leader Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, O'Malley, and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. Apparently this is a talking point O'Malley has spewed before, and this is what FactCheck had to say about it:
Comparing jobs data for Bush and Obama has become a talking point for Democrats. But it is a misleading talking point since they ignore job losses under Obama and compare only his job gains to Bush’s job-creation record. We pointed this out last month, when Obama claimed he created more private-sector jobs in the past 27 months than were created “during the entire seven years before this crisis.” That’s simply cherry-picking the jobs data. Obama ignores the job losses during the recession he inherited, but assigns Bush full responsibility for job losses during the recession that began within weeks of Bush taking office in 2001
In this case, O’Malley is not merely misleading, but wrong - at least about 2010.
BLS data for total nonfarm seasonally adjusted jobs show the U.S. had 130,346,000 jobs as of December 2010, up from 129,319,000 in December 2009. That’s 1,027,000 new jobs - slightly less than the 1,095,000 jobs created in Bush’s eight years, from January 2001 to January 2009. The U.S. added more than 1.8 million jobs in 2011, so O’Malley is right about that.
[Source]
It can get a bit crazy during election season but this is why people need to pay attention to the real issues. It should be noted that in the same FactCheck article pointing out O'Malley's somewhat false statement, Bobby Jindal was also called-out for misleading information regarding the Massachusetts job rate under Governor Romney. It's nothing new for political parties to play spin doctor. The voting public needs to pay attention and know the facts on the issues instead of paying attention to needless distractions.