Sasquatch might as well have traipsed across the White House lawn Friday with a lost Warren Commission file on his way to the studio where NASA staged the moon landing.
Conspiracy theorists came out in force after the government reported a sudden drop in the U.S. unemployment rate one month before Election Day. Their message: The Obama administration would do anything to ensure a November victory, including manipulating unemployment data.
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The conspiracy theory was widely rejected. Officials at the Labor Department said the jobs figures are calculated by highly trained government employees without any political interference. Democrats and even some Republicans said they also found the charges implausible.
Yet that didn’t stop the chatter. The allegations were a measure of how politicized the monthly unemployment report has become near the end of a campaign that has focused on the economy and jobs.
The conspiracy theory erupted after former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, a Republican, tweeted his skepticism five minutes after the Labor Department announced that the unemployment rate had fallen to 7.8 percent in September from 8.1 percent the month before.
“Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change numbers,” Welch tweeted, referring to the site of Obama campaign headquarters.
The drop in unemployment was announced two days after Obama’s lackluster performance in his first debate with Republican challenger Mitt Romney.
Republican Rep. Allen West of Florida soon announced via Facebook that he agreed with Welch.
“Somehow by manipulation of data we are all of a sudden below 8 percent unemployment, a month from the presidential election,” West wrote. “This is Orwellian to say the least.”
The Obama administration wasn’t given much time to gloat about the strong economic improvement. Instead, it had to defend statisticians and economists against accusations made without any supporting evidence.
“No serious person … would make claims like that,” said Alan Krueger, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors, said that it’s “not that unusual” for the rate to move by three-tenths of a percent in one month. It’s happened 12 times in the past 10 years.
“In other words, at least once a year, you should expect that large a move,” he said in an email to clients. It last happened 20 months ago, “so we were overdue. That is just the reality of the data.”
Romney didn’t try to discredit the government data. But plenty of conservatives did that work for him.
• Conn Carroll, an editorial writer at the Washington Examiner, tweeted: “I don’t think BLS cooked numbers. I think a bunch of Dems lied about getting jobs. That would have same effect.”
• Rick Manning, communications director of Americans for Limited Government and the former public affairs chief of staff at the Labor Department, said “anyone who takes this unemployment report serious is either naive or a paid Obama campaign adviser.”
• Rep. Paul Broun, a Georgia Republican, weighed in with a statement saying the report “raises questions for me, and frankly it should be raising eyebrows for people across the country.”
Economists offered more plausible reasons for skepticism. A big chunk of the increase in employed Americans came from those who had to settle for part-time work: 582,000 more people reported that they were working part-time last month but wanted full-time jobs.
Conspiracy theories are nothing new for Obama. He has been dogged by discredited claims that he wasn’t born in this country and that he is Muslim.
Justin Wolfers, a professor of business and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, went on Twitter to say Welch “just labeled himself an idiot.”
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