Someone at the Washington Post will surely have received a phone call from the White House today to have a conversation with Josh Hicks, who compares and contrasts the economic records of George Bush and Barack H. Obama (I added the H because it’s raaaaacist): Obama’s remarks on worst job growth: Did he end it or should he own it?. Josh spends quite a bit of time going through numbers and such, and finally concludes:

There’s no doubt that Bush owns an unimpressive record on job creation. But Obama comes in either last, second-to-last or in the bottom half among presidents since the Great Depression, depending on which way you look at the numbers.



The president said that policies from 2000 through 2008 produced the “most sluggish job growth we’ve ever seen.” Perhaps so, but the worst numbers on record occurred under his watch.

Obama chose a poor metric for measuring past administrations. To make his point with jobs data, he has to point to his own numbers and completely disavow much of them, or else ignore public-sector losses. We came close to thinking this was worth Three Pinocchios, but ultimately decided he was not necessarily including his record in the statement. Still, it’s a very fine line. The president should be much more careful about making such a sweeping claim.