let me give issue perspective. put aside the unemployment rate for a a while because there are lots of reasons why that s not the most effective way to look at this. the most effective way is job growth, the number of jobs lost or added in a given month. let s go back to january of 2011. you can see all through 2011, we gain jobs. off to a strong start and then we started talking about a double dip recession, issues in europe became more serious. our debt crisis became an issue, the debt ceiling debook kell that we had, the downgrade, all that happened in the late summer and companies were hesitant about hiring more people. but starting late summer and into the fall, we ve had strong growth. from october through january, it s been a steady trend upward culminating in january where we added 243,000 job, the vast majority private sector jobs. how does it affect the political landscape? republicans have been using president obama s job creation record against him. and jobs are