Walker's Triple-Trickery On State Jobs Numbers

Along with the rest of us, Wrong-Way Walker knows that his signature campaign promise to create 250,000 new private sector jobs in one term is a bust.

Solid signs of the failure of his robotically-rightwing economic 'planning' that included tax cuts for businesses and upper-income filers combined with take-home income hits to middle-income public employees statewide have been there for a long, long time.

So he's now got a three-step charade underway to detoxify and otherwise hide that reality from voters who will decide in two months whether he wins re-election.

1. In statements and campaign ads, Walker redefines the jobs promise into a "goal." After all, missing a goal isn't as serious as breaking a promise. And he will throw in self-aggrandizing terms like "big...bold...aggressive" to embellish his stature and performance, when, in fact, the promise and his leadership to keep it is failing:

Perhaps the most important number coming out of the state's July jobs report is this: 29,437.

That's how many jobs Wisconsin employers would have to add each month for the remaining five months of the year in order for Gov. Scott Walker to achieve his top campaign promise --  creating 250,000 private-sector jobs by the end of his four-year term, 

That's more jobs than were created for two of the three full years that Walker has been in office. (In the year that topped the figure, employers added 33,872 jobs in 2011.)

2. He has had his state workforce department appointees release early just the state's jobs numbers they receive as part of a comprehensive federal data set that the feds routinely release themselves in a 50-state package.

The early release makes it tougher to see or appreciate the full context the state's comparative national ranking - - most recently #37 - - so the goal and consequence of the Walker manipulation is to obfuscate rather than inform fully.

Which, if you think about or have a good memory, is just what Walker, his campaign staff and the public employees under his control have been doing habitually for years.

Gov. Scott Walker and his top campaign and Milwaukee County aides were named Monday as part of a team that routinely commingled political and official county business.

The Journal Sentinel included a good explanation of the manipulation in a story yesterday showing Wisconsin job growth flat and remaining behind the national trend, further distancing Walker from  hitting his 250,000 goal and undermining his mantra that the state is moving in a good direction.

3.  Early on, Walker attacked a separate federal jobs data set as inaccurate because it relied on a small survey sample. But now that the comprehensive report noted above continues to show Wisconsin's relatively poor job growth, Walker cherry-picked numbers from one of the small survey samples that he'd earlier condemned that showed some good growth and used those numbers in a campaign ad - - even though the more comprehensive report shows no such thing.

Walker's data deceit is so transparent these days that PolitiFact rates "True" the sleuthing by a blogger and on-line commenter who spotted the deception in a different set of cooked numbers.

I'll add Walker's fuzzy math and calculated spin to my separate updated posting covering Walker's inveterate penchant for spin that, regrettable, is getting longer.