OK - so, you're David Axelrod. You've got another anemic jobs report for the president to comment on.

What do you have the president say?

1. It could have been worse if Bush was still in office.

2. Just wait until I get my new economics team in place! Then we're going to rock and roll!

3. Jobs report? What jobs report?

4. Just think of all the jobless benefits we're still paying out to grow the economy!

The truth is awful enough. The New York Times reports:

The United States economy ended the year by adding 103,000 jobs in December, the Labor Department said Friday, a number that missed expectations and suggested that job growth could continue to hinder a recovery.

In addition, the unemployment rate fell to 9.4 percent last month from 9.8 percent, its lowest rate since July 2009, in part because many Americans gave up looking for work.

The agency also revised estimates from the two earlier months, now saying that 210,000 jobs were created in October instead of 172,000, and 71,000 in November, instead of 39,000.

As with previous months, all of December's gain - 113,000 jobs - came from private employers.

Federal, state and local governments continued to shed jobs - cutting another 10,000 last month after trimming 8,000 in November, revised from 11,000 - mostly on the local level. States and municipalities dealing with tighter budgets may be faced with further cuts as they try to shrink their deficits.

Update from Thomas Lifson:

William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection has a great post reviewing the underlying data beneath the deceptive "decline" in unemployment, with charts. These two are particularly revealing:

The labor participation rate over the past 20 years - at a 20 year low:


Here is a chart combining the unemployed, and the marginal and discouraged workers: