The better-than-expected U.S. jobs report today is providing fodder for the country's rival presidential candidates in the last weekend of their campaign, a race that has seen the Republicans try to portray President Barack Obama as an economy stifler and the Democrats play up employment gains over the last four years.
The U.S. added 171,000 jobs in October, the Labour Department said Friday, and hiring was stronger over the previous two months than first thought — by a further 84,000 positions.
It was the 25th straight month of job gains for the country's economy, and there are now 580,000 more people employed than when Obama took office.
Still, challenger Mitt Romney pointed to weakness in the numbers to support his contention that the recovery from the recession of four years ago should have been stronger by now.
The unemployment rate inched up from 7.8 per cent to 7.9 per cent, an increase the Labour Department called "essentially unchanged," because more people were looking for work. The U.S. only counts people actively seeking employment as part of the labour force.
With the figure that high, Obama will face voters on Tuesday with the highest unemployment rate of any incumbent since Franklin Roosevelt — though it's largely a problem he inherited on assuming the Oval Office in 2009.
Contentious Ohio ads
"We've made real progress," Obama told a crowd in Ohio shortly after the report. "But we've got more work to do."
The president's chief economic adviser, Alan Krueger, echoed that refrain. "While more work remains to be done, today's employment report provides further evidence that the U.S. economy is continuing to heal from the wounds inflicted by the worst downturn since the Great Depression," he said.
Romney, also campaigning in Ohio, fired back that the jobs report was a "sad reminder that the economy is at a virtual standstill."
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has expanded his campaign to target Pennsylvania. (David Goldman/Associated Press) The Buckeye State loomed large on the campaign calendar on Friday, with Obama scheduling three stops in the crucial battleground and Romney two. Campaign aides said the president planned to take on Romney directly over the Republican's new ads on the auto industry bailout.
The ads accuse Obama of taking General Motors and Chrysler into bankruptcy — something Romney himself had wanted — and selling Chrysler to an Italian company and building Jeeps in China. Chrysler and GM have protested the ads and disputed the suggestion that Jeep construction was being transferred overseas.
Vice-President Joe Biden has reacted sharply to the ads, calling them "one of the most flagrantly dishonest ads I can ever remember in my political career." But Obama has yet to weigh in directly, in part because much of his week was dominated by managing the federal response to superstorm Sandy.
Obama also has larger rallies in more urban Ohio areas planned for the weekend.
Pennsylvania challenged
But while Ohio was emerging as the most contested state in the final push to Election Day, Romney and the Republican Party were launching a new drive into Pennsylvania, a state that had been considered safely in Obama's column. Romney planned to campaign in the state Sunday and the Republican National Committee was putting $3 million in ads into the state.
Romney aides said they detected that Obama was underperforming in the southeastern counties around Pennsylvania, a usual Democratic stronghold, and in the working class area in and around Scranton.
Obama won the state handily in 2008, largely on the strength of his performance in the eastern part of the state. The RNC, however, says its voter outreach program has already exceeded its performance four years ago, with three times more phone calls and 19 more door knocks than at this time in 2008.
Obama aides dismissed the eleventh-hour move as an act of desperation that underscored Romney's weakness in other battlegrounds but said the Democratic campaign would increase its ad purchases in the state to respond to the RNC incursion.
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