Unemployment, Jobs Report | featured news

President Obama, Republican challenger Mitt Romney and their backers are stressing different aspects of today's jobs report -- the ones that bolster their respective campaigns.

... the last three months do suggest that the U.S. labor market is on an upward trajectory... whoever wins the presidential election next week will likely get to take credit for the recovery that’s now underway.

"[B]usinesses have created 4.4 million new jobs over the past 28 months," the president said, "including 500,000 new manufacturing jobs. That’s a step in the right direction. That’s a step in the right direction. But we can’t be satisfied, because our goal was never to just keep on working to get back where we were back in 2007, and I want to get back to a time when middle-class families and those working to get to the middle class have some basic security. That’s our goal.”

Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt responded in a statement. “The President brought us back from the brink of another Depression but he doesn’t believe our work is done -- he’s got a plan to restore the middle class and create a million jobs now that Mitt Romney opposes and Republican leaders have blocked," LaBolt's statement read in part. "Mitt Romney says he has a better path, but over the past decade we saw where that took us -- to the slowest job growth since World War II, the collapse of our financial system and the deterioration of the middle class."