Pants On Fire Alert: Axelrod Edition

David Axelrod, top political advisor to President Obama, was one of three White House advisors who took to the Sunday shows yesterday to plead the Administration’s case. Numerous outlets have noted that the three advisors gave three different accounts of the Administration’s record on jobs created–or ‘saved’.

But, the reality was actually worse than that. Axelrod alone could keep his own spin straight:

A year ago I told the president that a year from now your numbers will be much different than they are right nowbecause of the economic forecast we were hearing,” Axelrod said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “We knew that even as the economy started growing it would take time for the jobs to follow. That’s the nature of the economy.”

FACT: The unemployment rate known “a year ago” (i.e. on January 24, 2009) was 7.2% for December 2008 (Note: The December 2008 rate has subsequently been adjusted up to 7.4% by DOL).

FACT: The Romer-Bernstein report released on January 10, 2009 suggested that if stimulus passed, the unemployment rate would only be slightly above that December 2008 level a year later. Follow the darker “With Recovery Plan” line forward from right before Q1 2009 (where the lines depart) to Q1 2010. The “official” Administration projection in early 2009 was that, if stimulus passed, the unemployment rate would rise briefly, never exceed 8%, and would have fallen back to about 7.7% by the end of 2009. That’s no more than 0.5% higher than the level the President “inherited” in December 2008 – not nearly as “much different” as Axelrod now alleges.

So, we are supposed to believe that Axelrod was fully aware that the unemployment situation was going to get a lot worse. Yet, during debate over the ‘stimulus’ package, White House officials flooded the airwaves to claim that unemployment would peak at 8% with the stimulus and touch just over 9% without it. (Depending on how you calculate, the actual unemployment rate today is somewhere between 10-17%.) To believe Axelrod’s current account, then, these officials were consciously lying to the public.

Or, he believed the White House forecasts last year and thought the unemployment situation would have improved by now. In which case, he’s lying now.