Damon Winter/The New York TimesPresident Obama waved to the crowd after speaking at a campaign rally at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.11:56 a.m. | Updated After a lackluster debate, President Obama faced the prospect of a second piece of bad political news with Friday morning’s jobs report. Instead, Mr. Obama — and the economy — received some unexpected good news.
Economists will spend the rest of the day parsing the numbers and arguing over exactly the best way to describe the report, but there is little question about its overall thrust: positive.
An energized President Obama, appearing at a campaign rally outside Washington, seized on the news, saying “this country has come too far to turn back.”
Speaking to about 1,900 supporters at George Mason University a few hours after the numbers were released, Mr. Obama said, “This morning, we found out that the unemployment rate has fallen to its lowest level since I took office. More Americans entered the work force; more people are getting jobs.”
The rate dropped sharply, to 7.8 percent from 8.1 percent, because the Labor Department’s survey of households showed a large gain in the number of employed people in September. The survey of businesses showed a smaller gain, but it also showed that hiring gains in July and August were larger than expected.
Mr. Obama conceded that too many Americans were still out of work. But he turned the good economic news into a rallying cry against his opponent, Mitt Romney, lashing him to the policies of the George W. Bush administration.
“We’ve made too much progress to return to the policies that led to the crisis in the first place,” the president said to a chorus of cheers in an auditorium here. He added, “I won’t allow that to happen.”
But Mitt Romney sought to deny Mr. Obama even the semblance of a victory lap, declaring, that “this is not what a real recovery looks like. We created fewer jobs in September than in August, and fewer jobs in August than in July, and we’ve lost over 600,000 manufacturing jobs since President Obama took office.”
Campaigning in Abingdon, Va., Mr. Romney said the unemployment rate has declined because people have given up looking for work, and are no longer counted in the rate.
“If you just give up and say, ‘Look I can’t go back to work, I’m just going to stay home,’ ” he said, “why you’re no longer part of the employment statistics. So it looks like unemployment is getting better, but the truth is, if the same share of people were participating in the workforce today as on the day the president got elected, our unemployment rate would be around 11 percent.”
At this point in the presidential race, any single unemployment report is unlikely to have a major effect on the campaign. Friday’s report does not change the basic story line about the economy: it remains weak, and it continues to grow at a modest pace. The recovery from the financial crisis continues, but it will take a long time before the economy feels healthy.
For Mr. Obama, however, a fundamental change in the contours of the race is not the goal. Polls have consistently shown him with a small lead. The worry among his campaign advisers is that Mr. Romney’s strong performance in Wednesday’s debate and Mr. Obama’s weak one have the potential to be a watershed.
That concern no doubt remains, but it would have been all the stronger if the jobs report had been weaker.
Mr. Obama, in an interview shortly after his election, said that if unemployment remained above 8 percent, he was unlikely to win a second term. And a standard component of Mr. Romney’s case against Mr. Obama, on the campaign trail and in his advertising, is the fact that the unemployment rate had remained above 8 percent. Friday’s report changes that, causing the rate to fall to its lowest level since January 2009, shortly before Mr. Obama took office. (The report covers the middle of each month, before a new president is inaugurated on Jan. 20.)
For all the numbers in the report, the simple summary is that more people had jobs last month than economists expected.
In a note to clients, Jim O’Sullivan, the chief United States economist at High Frequency Economics, a research firm, called it “a much stronger report than expected.”
The Labor Department’s monthly survey of households showed a net gain of 873,000 jobs, a huge number that almost certainly reflects some statistical noise. That gain was the main reason for the sharp drop in the unemployment rate. Of the gain, 582,000 of the jobs came among part-time workers who wanted to be working full time.
The monthly survey of businesses showed a gain of only 114,000 jobs, which is in the broad range of the number needed merely to keep up with population growth. But each monthly jobs report also updates the numbers from the previous two months, as the Labor Department economists receive more detailed information.
This month, that information showed that the economy gained 86,000 more jobs in July and August than previously thought, ameliorating earlier worries about a slowdown in August hiring.
Combining the revisions with the September numbers, the new jobs report effectively shows a gain of 200,000 jobs in the business survey. In both the household survey and business survey, that is, the overall gain in full-time jobs was stronger than expected.
In the last 12 months, the economy has gained an average of 150,000 jobs a month. It gained an average of 85,000 in 2010, and in 2009, it lost an average of 422,000.
At the current pace of hiring, the economy remains years away from an unemployment rate that economists consider healthy. Mr. Obama has emphasized that the economy is moving in the right direction after a severe financial crisis, while Mr. Romney has emphasized that it has improved more slowly than many voters hoped or than Mr. Obama predicted.
The surprisingly strong report led to suggestions from some Republicans on Friday morning that Labor Department economists were manipulating the numbers for Mr. Obama’s benefit. On Twitter, Jack Welch, a Romney supporter and the former chief executive of General Electric, wrote: “Unbelievable jobs numbers … these Chicago guys will do anything … can’t debate so change numbers.”
Many economists of both parties believe such accusations are false. The Labor Department economists who compile the jobs report are not political appointees.
“Most economic data are nonsense” from month to month, Ian Shepherdson, an independent economist, wrote on Twitter, meaning that they contain a large amount of statistical noise. “But that does not mean it is rigged. We aren’t talking about Soviet tractor output here.”
Michael Barbaro and Ashley Parker contributed reporting.