By Kevin Liptak, CNN
WASHINGTON (CNN) – Mitt Romney, who has used an unemployment rate above 8% to hammer President Barack Obama for the past several years, was left without his usual attack line Friday as the September jobs report showed the rate falling to 7.8%.
The report, which is the penultimate set of monthly jobs data before November’s general election, also showed 114,000 jobs were created last month. The unemployment rate now stands where it did in 2009, when Obama took office. In a statement Friday, Romney said the numbers weren’t good enough. [RELATED: Stocks head for jobs-related gains; unemployment falls below 8 percent]
“This is not what a real recovery looks like,” Romney wrote. “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.”
Friday’s report showed revisions to the last two months of jobs data, indicating 181,000 jobs were created in July and 142,000 were created in August.
Romney noted in his statement that a “real unemployment rate” which included Americans who have dropped out of the labor force would be higher, saying “The results of President Obama’s failed policies are staggering — 23 million Americans struggling for work, nearly one in six living in poverty and 47 million people dependent on food stamps to feed themselves and their families.”
Romney has been consistent in criticizing Obama for policies he said have made it harder for Americans to find jobs, and a consistent point in his stump speech and in interviews has been an unemployment rate unable to slip below 8%.
Romney used the figure in his closing statement at Wednesday’s presidential debate, saying in a second term Obama would continue to preside over high unemployment.
“There’s no question in my mind that if the president were to be reelected you’ll continue to see a middle-class squeeze with incomes going down and prices going up,” Romney said, adding: “You’ll see chronic unemployment. We’ve had 43 straight months with unemployment above 8%.”
In his statement Friday, House Speaker John Boehner pointed to another bar for unemployment, writing the White House “said unemployment would be as low as 5.6% by now if Congress passed their ‘stimulus’ spending bill — instead, after four years of spending, taxing, and red tape, millions of Americans remain jobless, underemployed, or have simply given up looking for work.”
Boehner, who acknowledged some “positive news” in the September report, said the 7.8% rate still was too high.
“Middle class families deserve better than perpetually high unemployment,” he wrote.
Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, also pointed to a lower unemployment rate as a bar for success, writing “High unemployment remains a chronic condition in America, the seriousness of which is measured not simply by one number but by the millions of families trying to make ends meet in an impossible economy.”
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