But as job growth slowed last month, so did income growth. “One very discouraging item in the survey was a 0.1 hour drop in the length of the average workweek,” noted Dean Baker of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research. “Wages continue to go nowhere. The average hourly wage has increased at just a 1.85 percent annual rate over the last quarter, which likely puts it behind inflation.”

The president and his people will trumpet the statistic that says unemployment has dropped to 8.2 percent from a high of 10 percent 18 months ago. But it won’t help them much.

The unemployment rate has declined in large measure because the number of Americans deemed to be in the work force continues to shrink. If the work force today were the same size it was when Obama took office, the unemployment rate would be well over 10 percent.

This is important not because it’s a talking point for anti-Obamaites but because it offers a more precise sense of the public mood. That is, data may suggest superficially that unemployment has dropped, but those data don’t reflect the reality of American lives.