Romney And Obama Spar Over Disappointing Jobs Numbers

Not surprisingly, the disappointing jobs numbers released this morning quickly became fodder for the political world and the primary subject on the campaign trial, where President Obama is on a bus tour of Ohio and Pennsylvania while Mitt Romney wraps up in 4th of July family holiday gathering. The White House was the first out of the gate with an official statement that did its best to paper over what was clearly a disappointing report, saying that people shouldn’t read too much into the report and that the economy was continuing to recover. House Republicans countered by drawing attention to President Obama’s comments earlier this month that the private section was “doing fine,” by arguing that these numbers point out that this clearly isn’t true. It fell to Mitt Romney, though, to make the first public statement by a Presidential candidate on the new data at a hardware store in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire:
WOLFEBORO, N.H. – Mitt Romney called a rare press conference this morning to respond to June’s tepid jobs report, calling the unchanged unemployment rate “unacceptably high,” and repeatedly referring to the numbers as a “kick in the gut.”
In the hastily-called press conference, Romney’s first in more than a month, the presumptive GOP nominee conceded that some factors in the slow pace of jobs growth may be out of President Obama’s control, but said also that the president had failed at taking advantage of opportunities to improve the labor market that he could influence.

Read more: http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/romney-and-obama-spar-over-disappointing-jobs-numbers/