let me get mona back into this. andrea raised something before that is very interesting. is hillary clinton an extension of president obama, a third term? there s a lot she has been an advocate behind the scenes. the books talks about that for health care reform. she s certainly been pretty hawkish in a way, you know, driving a lot of his policies. so where does his presidency end and hers begin? or candidacy. a lot of it companies 0 down to how the competent is doing at that point, 2015. if things are moving forward and it looks like gdp growth is going to continue to pick up, the job picture looks better, she ll be able to say, you know, we ve started to build the pillars of you new united states. let s keep that going. she s got room to show there s a difference in her approach. for that she can pull back to the clinton era in terms of style and the way they approach politics. i think in the general election, huge advantage because
or looking for work, okay? the job picture has not improved. what? meaning more jobs haven t been created month to month. one out of six people are in poverty. 47 million americans are on food stamps. you can t just get up there and say well, things were bad when i inherited this. four years later they re slightly better. i don t really have any meat on the bones of a plan going forward. what do you mean, the jobs haven t improved month to month? i m saying that we all in the pundit class say this difference between the 8.1% and the 7.8% as some meaningful moment for the electoral process. i just think when you take a step back, the country is still facing a jobs crisis. the country is still facing a jobs crisis. it was meaningful when romney used the talking point they hadn t been below 8%. nobody believes let s have a sober conversation here. we re a month away from the election. this country s facing a jobs crisis. it s been facing a jobs crisis for a while. it s facin
contamination is high. the centers for disease control reporting there are 91 cases of meningitis in nine states. at least seven people have died. heather: a political battle breaking out over the number one issue to americans this election season: jobs. on friday, the labor department reporting that the unemployment rate for september is at 7.8 percent. the obama campaign touting that number showing the economy is picking up steam, the republicans, they say the actual job picture is far bleaker because that number does not account for millions of americans who are underemployed or who is simply given up looking for work. now, live for us in washington. doug we talked about a tweet from jack welch. did that ignite the controversy? reporter: the recovery surrounding friday s release of the unemployment numbers continues to swirl after jack
but doesn t part of that changesing job picture get get to the topic of education. yes, it does. long-term public education is the answer. keep in mind it s defunding, our university system, and we have an immigration policy that is taking the best and brightest out of our universities, sending them overseas because they can t stay here, to build the competitive universities overseas. so the one part of our education system that really is the best in the world is going away very fast. if you take a look at what we re doing here, long term it s education, but we can t wait for long term. you have to do that, but you have to do something for people right now. you have to do things that will expand our economy instead of having tariffs and immigration barriers, these are barriers, we need to get immigrants to come here and to develop. instead of worrying about a marginal tax rate, we ve got to help small businesses go and create jobs. instead of defunding education,
rate drops so significantly. is that because there just are more people who have given up searching for jobs? exactly. the unemployment is calculated on the basis of how many people say they re looking for jobs. if fewer people decide to look, because they re discouraged, the rate could go down because you have weak job creation. takes 150,000 jobs a month to keep up with population growth. anything less than that indicates a weaker job picture. this was not a good report for the administration, but we know that we re in a weak recovery. we know that we re in a weak labor market. and i think that has been so baked into the expectations, it is not likely to make a big difference. when you put these two things together, the economy and undecided voters and i think most analysts will tell you that they re really hyperfocused on suburban women still. we used to call the soccer moms in suburban ohio and suburban michigan, those kinds of places.