US News

Obama lauds new jobless numbers as Romney says growth is far too slow

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WASHINGTON — Lucky timing!

President Obama got a boost from new job statistics putting the unemployment rate below 8 percent just a month before the election, just days after a bad debate performance threw Obama off course and reinvigorated Mitt Romney.

The unemployment rate now stands at 7.8 percent, down from 8.1 percent the month before, and the lowest since Obama took office, according to the new Labor Department report on the job market.

Private-sector companies added a modest 114,000 jobs in September.

But the jobs numbers set up a new round of sparring between Obama and Romney over how strong the recovery really is.

Obama trumpeted the news at a rally with supporters in suburban Virginia.

“This morning, we found out that the unemployment rate has fallen to its lowest level since I took office,” he said.

“More Americans entered the work force. More people are getting jobs.”

But Obama cautioned that “too many” are still out of work and fired a warning shot at Romney.

“Today’s news certainly is not an excuse to try to talk down the economy to score a few political points.”

Romney’s campaign jumped on the numbers as more evidence of the slowness of the recovery, issuing a statement saying: “This is not what a real recovery looks like.”

“The truth is, if the same share of people were participating in the work force today as on the day that the president got elected, the unemployment rate would be around 11 percent,” Romney said while campaigning in southern Virginia.

“The reason it’s come down this year is primarily due to the fact that more and more people have just stopped looking for work,” he said.

But a Romney backer, former GE CEO Jack Welch, went a step further and accused the Obama Administration of manipulating the numbers — prompting a stiff denial from the White House and Labor Department.

The jobs number and unemployment rates are calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The drop in the unemployment came even as the feds reported a relatively small, 114,000 increase in new hiring last month based on information culled from 140,000 companies and government agencies.

The jobs survey also found that growth in July and August was stronger than first thought, revising those totals upward by another 86,000 jobs.

But the unemployment rate is based on a separate survey of 60,000 US households, which determined that 873,000 more people had jobs in September, the biggest increase since January 2003.

Meanwhile, Romney on Thursday night had completely backed off his secretly taped “47 percent” comments, telling Sean Hannity on Fox News Channel that, “This time, I was just completely wrong.”