Not a good sign for President Obama when his one of his most reliable cheerleaders in media turns into a skeptical fact-checker.
While MSNBC's token working stiff Ed Schultz remains reliably besotted with Dear Leader, he's also unwilling to let a misleading claim from Obama pass unchallenged. At least when Schultz is outside the narrow ideological confines of MSNBC and opining on his daily podcast.
Such was the case Monday while Schultz was talking about Obama's interview with Steve Kroft, broadcast on the previous night's "60 Minutes." While Schultz initially agreed with many of Obama's claims, an assertion about manufacturing jobs was more than Schultz could take (audio) --
SCHULTZ: If you want to go back to Mitt Romney, the 47 percent tape and more Wall Street deregulation and more profits to the top and more crapping on the working folk of America, you want to go right back to that, fine. But the fact is, the reason why the president is saying basically the same thing he said before the re-election in 2012 is because we're continuing to move forward. Now, he goes on to say that people just don't seem to be feeling it.
60 MINUTES' KROFT: Do you think people feel it?
OBAMA: They don't feel it and the reason they don't feel it is because income and wages are not going up. There are solutions to that. If we raise the minimum wage, if we make sure women are getting paid the same as men for doing the same work, if we are rebuilding our infrastructure, if we're doing more to invest in job training so people are able to get the jobs that are out there right now, because manufacturing is coming back to this country. Not just the auto industry that we saved, but you're starting to see real investment here in the United States. Businesses around the world are saying for the first time in a long time, the place to invest isn't China, it's the United States.
SCHULTZ: Well, let's get a truth meter here. Uh, the president's very optimistic but we did not add one single manufacturing job in the month of August. I'm all for it and I'm all positive, but that is a fact. The jobs that are being added are coming in the financial sector and the service sector and in the energy sector. But it's not happening in manufacturing. We still have outsourcing. We still have Romney vision with a lot of major companies who are putting their labor overseas.
So much for blaming Bush -- turns out Romney's at fault too, at least for the lackluster economy.
It would have been more accurate of Schultz to say that no new manufacturing jobs were created in August overall, that new jobs in the sector were offset by an equal number lost. "This jobs report is a big disappointment for factory workers," said Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing and a frequent Schultz guest. "While we can never read too much into just a month's worth of data, a goose egg for manufacturing doesn't look like progress to me."
Right after Schultz uncharacteristically corrected Obama, he reverted to form (audio) --
SCHULTZ: Can Democrats hang onto the Senate? The president thinks they can.
KROFT: Do you think you can hold the Senate?
OBAMA: Yes, I do.
KROFT: You think you can sell this? You think you can convince people that they're doing fine economically?OBAMA: Hopefully they get a chance to hear the argument. 'Cause all I'm doing is presenting the facts.
SCHULTZ: They are facts. They are facts.
And facts are stubborn things, as Schultz is quick to forget.
