I remember discussing with my wife during Obama’s campaign the utter conniving, political brilliance of Obama’s clever use of the phrase “save or create 3 to 4 million jobs in the next two years”. From his Feb 9 press conference:

Question: The American people have seen hundreds of billions of dollars spent already, and still the economy continues to free-fall. Beyond avoiding the national catastrophe that you’ve warned about, once all the legs of your stool are in place, how can the American people gauge whether or not your programs are working? Can they — should they be looking at the metric of the stock market, home foreclosures, unemployment? What metric should they use? When? And how will they know if it’s working, or whether or not we need to go to a plan B?

Answer: I think my initial measure of success is creating or saving 4 million jobs. That’s bottom line No. 1, because if people are working, then they’ve got enough confidence to make purchases, to make investments. Businesses start seeing that consumers are out there with a little more confidence, and they start making investments, which means they start hiring workers. So step No. 1, job creation.

Looking past the fact that if Obama is going to keep that campaign promise, he’d better stop having Broadway date nights and get cracking - the concept of “saving” jobs is complete poppycock. Let’s be clear, there is no metric collected anywhere, not from the Labor Department, the GAO, the Bureau of Labor Statistics nor the Treasury that would allow one to discern the number of jobs “saved”. This is the best scenario Obama could possibly hope to be in. He and Turbotax-cheat Geithner can come up with absolutely any cockamamie “study” they like that shows some enormous projection of how many jobs would likely be lost given a set of current policies, and then as long as that number is sufficiently large enough that the number of jobs actually lost (read: a real metric) is less than the “potential”, The Messiah has done the impossible, he has “saved” jobs. It is complete and utter garbage, and the media is complicit in letting him continue to spew this malarkey and treat it as actual economics. Can you imagine if the Bush administration had tried to use this as the basis for their monetary policy? Forget it - you need not strain yourself any further.

Luckily, there are a few intelligent folks in the media still who are willing to report the truth occasionally. William McGurn’s piece today in the Wall Street Journal covers the situation, and in fact includes a quote from Senate Finance Committee, Chairman Max Baucus (who is a Democrat, btw) challengind Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner directly on the formula:

“You created a situation where you cannot be wrong,” said the Montana Democrat. “If the economy loses two million jobs over the next few years, you can say yes, but it would’ve lost 5.5 million jobs. If we create a million jobs, you can say, well, it would have lost 2.5 million jobs. You’ve given yourself complete leverage where you cannot be wrong, because you can take any scenario and make yourself look correct.”

Bottom line, the statement that this administration has created 150,000 jobs in an economy where we have demonstrably lost more than 10x that number of jobs (again, with actual data behind it) is a complete fabrication and the American people should be ashamed of themselves for allowing both Obama to get away with this, and for allowing the MSM to refuse to challenge him on it.