The unemployment rate fell from 10.2 percent to 10 percent last month, achingly close to the single-digit mark, as employers cut the fewest jobs since the recession began. Fortuitously for the president, the figures came out the morning after a high-profile job-creation summit at the White House.
It couldn't have come at a better time for Obama, who, as he approaches his one-year anniversary, has pretty much exhausted the option of blaming his problems on his predecessor. As Bloomberg News noted, almost half of the 7.2 million jobs lost have been since Obama took office.
The so-called underemployment rate - workers who can't get full-time jobs or have quit looking - is still bad, 17.2 percent, but that, too, is down, from 17.5 percent. And the average time out of work is more than 28 weeks, the longest since the government started keeping those records in 1948.
The jobs summit mainly showed that high-level business, labor and government leaders are worried about job creation, but the likely outcome is a grab bag of relatively small-bore proposals - tax credits for new hires, weatherization programs, so-called "cash for caulkers" and small-business investment incentives.
But the president candidly conceded that large-scale infrastructure projects will take too long to have an impact - Obama admitted that he had become disenchanted by the description "shovel-ready" - and that with a $1.4 trillion deficit, there isn't money for direct federal job-creation programs.
Still, with Friday's figures, there was cause for cautious optimism. The average workweek and average pay are up slightly, and revised figures for September and October found 159,000 fewer jobs lost than first reported.
And economists say that after 23 straight months of job losses, the economy is close to the point, probably in the next quarter, where employers will have to start hiring. Regardless of what the other economic indicators say, the recession won't truly be over until they do.
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