“I’d say we’re making slow but steady progress, but like the president said, we’ve got a ways to go,” the Democratic Party chief said. She pointed out that the economy has produced 25 consecutive months of private sector job growth and more than four million jobs during the Obama administration.

Romney, the GOP presidential frontrunner, and other Republicans criticized the jobs report as weak and said it was a further indictment of the president’s failure to lead a strong recovery.

“What’s really bothersome to me,” Wasserman Schultz said, “is that it almost seems like my Republican colleagues in Congress and Mitt Romney are rooting for economic failure. I mean, they’ve been hyper-focused on one job, Barack Obama’s, for really the last two years.”