First, the assertion indicates the president has fallen prey to the temptation to believe in macroeconomic generalities that make him feel good, rather than facing the practical realities of life outside the White House bubble…

In any case, the health of the private sector can’t be measured solely or even primarily by job creation. Most people, after all, haven’t gone through the horror of unemployment.

What they have gone through is a period in which they have almost no job mobility, and a period in which their wages haven’t grown much — even as the inflated cost of gas and food has eaten away at what little gain they have enjoyed.

And that doesn’t even get into the discomfiting anxieties that come with working in America in 2012 — the sense that many jobs are tenuous, that maybe your employer can get by with one worker instead of two and that the one who gets laid off will be you.