Obama: “As a nation, we’re moving forward again”

Of course, they’re obviously going to spin any seeming drop in the unemployment rate, no matter how paltry, as a win due to President Obama’s policies (nevermind that the president told us that the unemployment rate would fall below six percent by now with the stimulus), and use it as an excuse to tell Congress that they need to do more to comply with President Obama’s agenda, that the financial recession was Wall Street’s fault, that we need to get behind Obama’s proposed tax hike, rabble rabble rabble — all the usual suspects.

After losing about 800,000 jobs a month when I took office, our businesses have now added 5.2 million new jobs over the past two and a half years. And on Friday, we learned that the unemployment rate is now at its lowest level since I took office. More Americans are entering the workforce. More Americans are getting jobs.

But too many of our friends and neighbors are still looking for work or struggling to pay the bills – many of them since long before this crisis hit.

We owe it to them to keep moving forward. We’ve come too far to turn back now. And we’ve made too much progress to return to the policies that got us into this mess in the first place.

For example – two years ago, we put in place tougher, commonsense rules of the road for Wall Street to make sure that the kind of crisis we’ve been fighting back from never happens again.

These rules mean that big banks are no longer going to be able to make risky bets with your deposits. And if a big bank does make a bad decision, they pay for it – not taxpayers.

And we also put in place the strongest consumer protections in our history to crack down on the worst practices of credit card companies and mortgage lenders.

Jim Pethokoukis had some great posts yesterday explaining why the newly revealed unemployment rate isn’t so much a sign of going “forward” as going nowhere, but it would appear that the cheap, populist, soak-the-rich messaging is having an effect on at least some people:

President Obama and the Democrats shattered the election cycle’s fund-raising record with a $181 million haul for September, the campaign announced on Saturday morning.

The amount — a mix of funds raised directly by the campaign and large checks taken in by the Democratic National Committee — was even more than some earlier reports had suggested. And while it did not quite match the roughly $191 million Mr. Obama and the Democrats raised during the same month four years ago, the announcement offered a jolt of good news for Mr. Obama’s supporters in the wake of a lackluster debate performance on Wednesday that left many of them worried.

Romney’s September tally isn’t out yet, but this is it — we’re heading into the last month of crunch time, and both camps are going to be burning through their cash. Just in case you haven’t had enough of campaign spots popping up on TV and YouTube and whatnot with Team Obama hyping up the not-a-recovery with this type of messaging, the fun’s only just getting started.

• Bobby Jindal: Paternalistic, big-government liberalism is the biggest loser here
• Chris Christie: “I’ll be here to welcome” Obama when he comes to tour the NJ coast again next week
• MSNBC consensus: Obama’s speech was historic, amazing, “one of the best of his presidency”

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