President Barack Obama made remarks at a DNC event in Washington at the Mandarin hotel on Monday, where he touted the number of private sector jobs he said the administration created. The problem, however, was those watching the closed captioned text of the speech on television sets saw a laugh cue instead of an applause cue. In fact, the text of the laugh cue is still on the White House website: (bolding is mine)
We are obviously going through one of the toughest periods in American history. We went through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and immediately after being elected, I had to take a series of very difficult steps to rescue ourselves from the brink. We had lost 4 million jobs in the six months before I was sworn in; lost another 4 million during the period probably six months after I was elected. And so as a consequence, we had to do some things that we didn’t expect we would have to do, just to save the economy — stabilize the financial system, make sure that states and local governments didn’t have to lay off police officers and cops and firefighters. We had to save an auto industry. I never expected to be a automobile executive. (Laughter.)
As a consequence of that swift, decisive, and sometimes difficult period, we were able to take an economy that was shrinking by about 6 percent and create an economy that is now growing, and has grown steadily now over many consecutive quarters. Over the last 15 months we’ve created over 2.1 million private sector jobs. (Laughter.) We have an auto industry that, for the first time in a very long time is profitable, and the Big Three automakers actually gaining market share, and not only gaining market share, but also gaining market share in the cars of the future so that they’re actually competing in compact cars and sub-compact cars and electric cars and hybrids.
Obviously, the president isn’t laughing, but Republicans and other critics of his private sector job creation claims sure are.
