Obama’s media bootlicks have been pushing a story for weeks, if not longer, about the huge success of Obama’s job creation record and sniveling about how the stupid Americans and vicious, racist right-wingers won’t give him credit. For instance, inveterate Obama fluffer, Michael Tomasky, writing at The Daily Beast:

And what about Obama’s numbers? I’d betting that even if you’re an Obama partisan, you think they’re not all that different from Bush’s. After all, 2009 was miserable: minus 798,000, minus 701,000, minus 826,000, and so on. The numbers went into the black in early 2010, but dipped back into the red in the summer. But remember, since October 2010, every report has been positive—the now 45 straight months of job growth that the president and his team, to little avail, crow about.

From his “State of the Union” speech:

Since 2010, America has put more people back to work than Europe, Japan, and all advanced economies combined. Our manufacturers have added almost 800,000 new jobs. Some of our bedrock sectors, like our auto industry, are booming. But there are also millions of Americans who work in jobs that didn’t even exist ten or twenty years ago – jobs at companies like Google, and eBay, and Tesla.

There are all kinds of reasons for this phenomenon, but the biggest reason is that Obama’s job gains ignore the fact that the population continues to grow and comparing raw numbers of jobs is an exercise in duplicity.  When coupled with the chronic unemployment problem that is only alleviated by pushing people onto disability programs and a declining unemployment rate driven entirely by a decreasing workforce participation rate, one quickly understands why Obama gets scant credit: he doesn’t deserve any.

Another reason is that job growth is not widespread. Rather it is concentrated in relatively small areas so high job creation in one state is not felt nationwide. For instance:

It’s a pretty impressive story of how job creation in just one state – Texas – is solely responsible for the 1.169 million net increase in total US employment (+1,444,290 Texas jobs minus the 275,290 non-Texas job loss) in the seven year period between the start of the Great Recession in December 2007 and December 2014. The other 49 states and the District of Columbia together employ about 275,000 fewer Americans than at the start of the recession seven years ago, while the Lone Star State has added more than 1.25 million payroll jobs and more than 190,000 non-payroll jobs (primarily self-employed and farm workers).

If Obama wants credit to be given for job creation, the first step would be for him to thank Rick Perry. Then maybe he could start advocating the low tax, low regulation policies that have made this possible.