The October employment numbers elicited an unexpected response from the White House. It was not enough just to cheer the good news that the October employment gain of 128,000 workers was better than expected and the employment counts for August and September had been revised to add 95,000 additional workers. Instead, President Trump tweeted that if the count had been done fully there would have been more than 300,000 jobs added in October.

Trump was echoing John Greenleaf Whittier’s famous line of poetry: “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’”