American Crossroads is up with an ad in battlegrounds hitting Obama for the unemployment rate. The actor in the ad charges. “This is what President Obama said the jobless rate would be if we passed the stimulus – 5.6%. But this is what the jobless rate actually is – 8.1%.”
Of course, that charge is a familiar one from Republicans, but not one Obama actually made. FactCheck.org from a Romney speech last week in which he made a similar claim: “Romney is referring to a speculative report issued at the beginning of Obama’s presidency containing projections — not promises. Those projections relied on prevailing economic models that quickly proved to have underestimated the depths of the recession at that time.”
More: “This is a slight variation on an old, frequently cited (and misleading) claim that Obama promised to keep unemployment below 8 percent. Its roots are in a report issued by Christina Romer, then chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Jared Bernstein, who held the title of “chief economist” to Vice President Joe Biden. The Jan. 9, 2009, report sought to forecast the unemployment rate with and without the then-proposed economic stimulus. Romney is correct that the report projected the unemployment rate with the economic stimulus would be 5.4 percent in the third quarter of 2012. The report projected it would be about 6 percent without the stimulus. Romney, however, has framed these forecasts as Obama promises, and that’s a stretch. For one, the report emphasized in several places that due to the volatility of the economy at the time, there was ‘substantial uncertainty around all of our estimates.’”
