“We got good news, but we didn’t get such strong news to hold out a promise to those Americans that are looking for work and are discouraged,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Congressional Budget Office director, said on a conference call hosted by the Republican National Committee. “I think that promise becomes the heart of the economic performance of the rest of the year. What confidence will people have in the president and his policies?”

There is ample evidence, Republicans point out, to refute the claim that Obama’s policies have done anything to earn such confidence.

The U.S. economy, for starters, remains embroiled in the longest jobs recession since the Great Depression. Forty-nine months have passed since the country hit peak employment in January 2008, surpassing the previous record of 47 months following the post-9/11 recession in 2001, during which unemployment never rose above 6.3 percent. By contrast, February marked the 37th consecutive month the unemployment rate has exceeded 8 percent. That is the longest streak in the post-World War II era.