This Friday's jobs report

If the Friday jobs report is good, who will be the first RWer to say on TV that the report was doctored by the labor department?

I will predict Dick Morris on the Hanninty show. "Everyone knows these reports are political, Sean."

(The BLS jobs reports are actually about as free of political interference as anything could be.)

__________

The Friday BLS jobs report really is very important, politically.

Oddly enough, however, it might as well be a coin-flip. An individual month's report does say all that much in isolation, and even when a result is strong one way or another, it can still seem to cut the opposite way.

For instance, consider this BussinessIndsider.com headline about the previous report:

I do not expect a good report because these thing have a reversion-to-the mean averaging quality and July beat expectations handily. But hey, at least August is 31 days. Bernanke was quite glim about the labor situation in his most recent testimony, but at least the Fed beige book was decent this month. How many teachers and other school related staff were added to payrolls in August may be a key factor in public sector figures. The consensus this time around is a lackluster 125,00 jobs, and the unemployment rate staying at 8.3%.

The US economy is weaker than it was in the first part of 2012, and even that wasn't really strong. (1.8% GDP growth for first half of 2012. It would take a stretch of at least 2.5% to reduce unemployment much.)

But there is a slight reason to think the unemployment rate could go down, which is that July's rise to 8.3% was marginal—it was a apparently a rounding thing, barely topping 8.25%. So a drop to 8.24% would be a headline drop from 8.3% to 8.2%.

If Obama's preternatural luck comes into play, however, Friday would feature 175,000 jobs, a statistically fluky drop to 8.1% unemployment rate, a stock market rally of 200-300 points and beautiful weather in Charlotte.