we re talking about the conspiracy theory that has been floating around yesterday in response tots jobs numbers that the obama campaign has somehow manipulated these jobs numbers to get the president elected. i joked yesterday this is classic president obama not even jimmying the numbers correctly. he does a half measure. he gets tough and does it the chicago way and he comes up with 114,000 new jobs. but tell me about how does this affect the way that we conduct policy in this country? if people do lose trust, if we do get to a point where you don t think the numbers are trustable, right, and i can imagine i ve got to say here, i think the incentives are very different on the left and right.
can t you can t you wait until after the election? we said, no. they re an independent agency. we can t touch them. what we can do is try to explain what the numbers are. right. how they re derived, what does chain weighted do. the president then went on a campaign to try to explain the infamous chain weighted explanation tour. that was the high point of the presidency. but the point is no president except maybe nixon would actually try to change what the bureau of labor statistics does or the bea does. these are really independent statistical agencies. the idea that they would do that is it s, i say literally absurd. in fact, bos is headed by a political appoint tee but there is no political appoint tee m that position. it s actually vacant. right now it s headed up by an interim head who is himself a
mitt romney put on his ticket wrote the privatization plan to get rid of social security back during the bush years. so when you re asked about social security you would think you would heighten that contradiction. that was the point at which my head probably exploetded the most. i was like, what? yeah, i think you re right. i think if you go back to david axlerod had a lot of experience in running african-american candidates in illinois. he ran barack obama s campaign for statewide office. i think you have to realize that when you re running an african-american candidate in a nondistrict situation, right, there is always this modulation that occurs and that s the way axlerod had always run barack obama. he s always, as you said, he s never angry, always calm. no drama obama. that s part of his personality. the two go together. i don t think it completely comes from but he could have what you said, you know, i think this is great that you re agreeing that we should have regul
have not been added. you talk about manipulation. they should have increased that number by that amount and that would have even been more accurate, but they didn t do that. that s the best estimate they had at the moment. right. also to the adp survey that comes out a little before the jobs numbers. it s almost always more jobs than you end up getting in the bureau of labor statistics. there s questions of the different methodologies of figuring this out. i think what s more pressing for what you were talking about in terms of politics, back when bush was in the office, when the left wanted to escape from the bush administration, they watched the west wing. they didn t stop believing that bush was president or stop believing that any numbers were true or create their own polls in which job kerry was up by 15 points. where you actually had there was a little bit of that. right. but, i mean, the point is that the right i think has retreated into their own universe. they ve cre
regulation, not to cut taxes for the top, these are steps in the right direction if he actually lives by them. not just that, but the president was able to capitalize the next day. there were ads the next day using those lies. it s like a transcript. we read these things. when we read them we think lie, lie, lie, lie, lie. there were a few moments. there are some people who say this is strategic. one of the thing that s interesting in understanding the debate is the continuity of it. we keep being surprised by who barack obama is when he s just been the same the whole time. every time he doesn t fight hard enough. people are like, why isn t he fighting? watch this tape that our producers put together of critiques of barack obama s debate performance in the past. this is not last night s debate. take a look. a lot of the pundants are saying this was not a very strong performance last night for barack obama. hillary clinton is running as