Krueger's assertion notwithstanding, Newt Gingrich, John McCain and other notable pragmatists have registered serious concerns about manipulation of polling criteria and interpretation. My friend, Rep. Allen West, observed, "Somehow by manipulation of data we are all of a sudden below 8 percent unemployment, a month from the presidential election. [This report is] Orwellian to say the least, and representative of Saul Alinsky tactics. Trust the Obama administration? Sure, and the spontaneous reaction to a video caused the death of our ambassador ... and pigs fly."
To that end, I registered two questions with the Department of Labor this week regarding the household survey parameters: Were the criteria determining the demography and geography of households surveyed in September the same as for all previous months in 2012? Were the survey results interpreted according to the same norms and standards?
I have received no answer other than the public statement of Labor's Karen Kosanovich, who insists, "We have done a monthly survey since 1940 and the methods have broadly not changed."
Assuming the survey criteria were not manipulated and Obama simply won the statistical mega lotto, one might still surmise that his smug debate demeanor reflected advanced knowledge of the "ace-in-the-hole" that would be publicly announced 36 hours after his debate debacle. For the record, it is unlawful for the administration to receive the results of those surveys until after the close of financial markets the afternoon prior to the public release of that data the next morning.
Surely no cutout Obamaphile over at Labor would have passed the survey results to some cutout Obamaphile in the White House ahead of the debate ... surely not?
Typical of the Leftmedia promotion of the jobs numbers, on the day it was released ABC News reported, "Mitt Romney surprised President Obama with a dynamic debate performance Wednesday night, but he's been upstaged today by another October shocker as the unemployment rate plunged from 8.1% to 7.8%, its lowest since Obama took office in 2009."
"October shocker" is a bit understated.
For the last week, Obama has been launching every stump speech with this theme: "We found out the unemployment rate fell to its lowest rate since I took office. It's a reminder this country has come too far to turn back now."
And Obama will back that up this week by citing a Department of Labor report that the Leftmedia proclaims is evidence the 7.8% is accurate. The DoL report notes that weekly jobless claims dropped by 30,000 to a mere 364,000 new unemployment claims -- lower than it was when Obama was elected.
Sound familiar?
What the Leftmedia is not reporting is what was in the fine print of this report: "One large state didn't report some quarterly figures." A DoL analyst concluded that the "missing figures" account for most of the decline. In other words, there was little or no decline in new jobless claims, but who reads the fine print -- certainly not Obama's useful idiots. (Expect more on this from Joe Biden in the VP debate tonight.)
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