C'mon. Even Darrell Issa admits jobless numbers weren't manipulated.
Last week, Gov. Nathan Deal dipped deep into the well of conservative mythology to explain away the fact that at 8.1 percent, Georgia now has the highest unemployment rate in the country.
According to Deal, jobless rates in Georgia and other Republican-led states have been going up for some mysterious reason, while rates in Democratic-led states have been falling. "I don’t know how you account for that," Deal said ominously. "Maybe there is some influence here that we don’t know about.”
Of course, it was pretty clear what "influence" he was suggesting. As his campaign staff later confirmed, the governor was suggesting that the Georgia jobless rate was being manipulated to make him look bad, just as some conservatives believe the jobless rate was artificially manipulated from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent to help President Obama win re-election in 2012.
For those folks, it doesn't matter that an inspector general's investigation has found not the slightest bit of evidence of manipulation, and in fact found extensive evidence that manipulating the outcome of surveys would be impossible short of a crude, massive, easily detectable conspiracy among those collecting the data.
"It is theoretically possible, though unlikely, that a large number of field representatives working in concert could depress the unemployment rate through falsification," the report concluded. "Our investigation determined that, to move the unemployment rate from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent through falsification between August and September 2012, it would have taken approximately 78 field representatives changing all unemployed household members to employed" on the surveys they conducted.
Even the House Oversight Committee, chaired by the highly partisan Darrell Issa, was grudgingly forced to conclude after its own investigation that there was no evidence whatsoever that the national jobless rate had been manipulated prior to the election. The whole claim is a fantasy, but a fantasy that some continue to defend no matter what.
The good news is, Deal and his defenders also offer an explanation for which there IS actual evidence. They point out that in the summer of 2013, preliminary estimates of Georgia's jobless rate turned out to be too high, and were later revised downward by as much as half a percentage point. They believe that a similar phenomenon may have occurred in 2014 as well, and they could be right.
So let's assume the best-case scenario. Let's assume that the preliminary BLS numbers are indeed skewed and are later revised downward by half of a percentage point, just as Deal suggests. Should that happen, Georgia's jobless rate would fall from 8.1 to 7.6 percent. That would tie us with Nevada for the 48th worst unemployment rate in the country, barely ahead of Rhode Island and Mississippi.
In other words, I'm not sure it changes much. "Worst in the nation" is a great headline for the Jason Carter campaign, and they'll no doubt repeat it at every opportunity. But in the larger context, whether we're 50th or 48th doesn't really matter: It's not where we want to be and not where we ought to be.
