For Team Obama, recovery is always just around the corner

The White House’s spin-meisters did their best Friday morning after news broke that the official unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 8.3 percent. Alan Krueger, chairman of the Council of Economic advisors, insisted the rate hadn’t really risen. “[M]ore precisely, the rate rose from 8.217 percent in June to 8.254 percent,” he said. So, you see, the rate was “essentially unchanged.” Those 45,000 newly unemployed represented by that figure? Just a rounding error.

President Obama cautioned on Friday that “we all knew when I started this job it would take some time.” But did “we” really know that? It doesn’t seem that Obama’s team did, judging from the rosy economic rhetoric they have used whenever it was in their interest to do so.