Mike Pence’s Jobs Comment: Fair or Foul

• Author: Mary Singleton
• Posted: 2024-03-19

There are a lot of adjectives that one may use to describe the polarizing nature of America’s politics, with “weird” being chief among them. For a large portion of the nation, it’s not about what a politician does or says or the impact they have; rather, it’s about the letter beside their name, that “R” or “D.” Nowhere is this more noticeable in how the mainstream media reacted to former President Obama versus how they react to current President Trump. Trump, like or dislike him, has said a lot of things true, and a lot of things false. He’s done some good things, and some bad things. He’s a politician, of course, just like his Vice President, Mike Pence, who really raised a ruckus with a comment he made earlier this week.

Mike Pence said that President Trump has “created more jobs in 3 months than Obama created in 8 years.” Of course, as one might imagine, media was quick to jump on this, with teams and scores of people working as hard as they could to debunk the notion that Trump created jobs.

Yesterday, Wednesday August 12, VP Mike Pence went on Fox News and made the claim that Trump’s administration is responsible for more jobs in the past few months than the Obama administration created in two full terms as President. The dig wasn’t at President Obama, however; it was directed at Presidential candidate Joe Biden, whom Pence and Trump hope to defeat in November’s Presidential Election.

Though the issue at hand for mainstream media was whether or not the claim was true, not at whom it was directed. Economic experts claim that the total of Trump’s jobs does not count unless you take into account April’s loss of around 20 million jobs. So they’re not judging Trump’s total economy in his nearly four years in office; they’re just looking at Pence’s claim of three months, so they note that Trump’s administration can only claim credit for 9 million jobs, whereas Obama’s administration is responsible for 11.6 million jobs gained over his full two terms.

Over the course of 2020, the economy has really fluctuated drastically. Prior to the Covid-19 outbreak, America’s economy was stronger than it had been in decades. Though when April hit, nearly 21 million jobs were lost and the nation’s unemployment rate stood at over 12%, which was higher than during the Great Depression. So, for most people, it doesn’t matter whether Pence is correct, or if the mainstream media is correct. What matters to most people is whether or not they have a job and can afford rent and groceries and other crucial bills.

The Needless Cherry-Picking of Media

One thing that media does like no other entity is existence is that it reframes an issue in order to address. While Pence’s comments were meaningless to most people, as nearly everyone recognizes that it’s just a talking point against Joe Biden during campaign season, and an innocuous one at that, mainstream media blows these sorts of things out of proportion constantly. So, in order to claim that Pence’s comment was too far off base, media had to go back to April.

We’re in August now. If we’re counting the three months about which Pence is speaking prior to August, it would be May, June and July, when the nation started again adding more jobs. Though media was not about to judge Pence’s comments by his actual words. Instead, all the talking heads and Twitterites went off on tangents about Pence leaving out April, when America lost over 20 million jobs, and claimed that means his point was incorrect. However, Pence wasn’t including April. He was only speaking about May through July. Media know that, but it’s easier if they include April.

This is part of the reason that people are getting fed up with politics, on both sides of the aisle, and especially fed up with an agenda-driven media. The American people want jobs. They want to be able to support their families. They want to put this pandemic behind them. Though no matter how innocuous a comment may be, mainstream media decide to blow things up into a two-day story and dominate the news cycle with “fact checking” and firing back against the comments.

The bottom line is that it doesn’t matter to the American people that Vice President Mike Pence went on a talk show to campaign positively for his own re-election. What matters to the American people is the economy, regardless of who helps fix it.