The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news.

Americans are still dropping out of the work force at a record pace:

The jobs report showed the unemployment rate dropping a bit, to 7.6 percent. But the number of jobs created — 88,000 — was far less than expected, and a big reason the unemployment rate fell is because nearly half a million people dropped out of the workforce.

The media is obligingly carrying the Democrats' water by pointing at the sequester, which allows them to ignore the factor that is more important since it kicked in with the first paycheck in the New Year, namely the  increase in payroll taxes. 

Also in the "The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news" file, Walter Russell Mead writes:

We are, however, thrilled that we don’t have a Republican in the White House, because if we did, the press would be incessantly yammering about this bad news until we were all sick of it. As it is, they are likely to say as little as possible about what appears to be a massive failure of economic policy and go back to covering the really important issues, like gay marriage.

If a Republican president got very busy on social issues at a time of economic stagnation and disappointment, there would be earnest hand-wringing of the “What’s Wrong with Kansas” variety about how American rubes were being diverted from their true economic interests by the skillful manipulation of emotionally charged social issues and identity politics. This would be taken as a sign of the cynicism of the ruling party and the clueless credulity of the hypnotized voters.

Fortunately, we aren’t going to have to listen to any of that depressing rhetoric now. Social issues are good and important; economic questions like jobs and incomes and growth are a distraction from the real business of the people.