Did you catch that? If you just take the audio of Obama saying “the private sector is doing fine,” you could perhaps use it to run an ad against the president.

I don’t, for the life of me, understand why people get so excited over things like this. Is there any evidence that either campaign is having trouble coming up with enough damaging quotes, out-of-context comments or grainy video clips to populate their attack ads?

Nor do I understand why the media see it as part of their job to police the statements of politicians for comments that opposing campaigns might find helpful. Remember: In any speech where a politicians makes a “gaffe,” he or she also made a point. Probably more than one. Mitt Romney, for instance, was making a serious point about the health insurance system when he said “I like being able to fire people who provide me services.” But the public learned a lot more about his gaffe than about his health-care policies that day.

But let’s look at Obama’s comments another way: Are they true?

Since Obama was elected, the public sector has lost about 600,000 jobs. If you put those jobs back, the unemployment rate would be 7.8 percent.

But what if we did more than that? At this point in George W. Bush’s administration, public-sector employment had grown by 3.7 percent. That would be equal to a bit over 800,000 jobs today. If you add those hypothetical jobs, the unemployment rate falls to 7.3 percent.

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