As the 2012 presidential election approached, the first Friday of each month was suddenly weighted with remarkable political importance. Those were the days on which the government released new jobs data and, in doing so, offered a sort-of-real-time assessment of how President Obama was doing in steering the country out of the recession that began several years prior.
In October 2012, those numbers showed continued improvement, to the White House’s relief: The economy had added 114,000 jobs in September. But Jack Welch, one of the biggest names in the business world and an endorser of Obama’s 2012 opponent, wasn’t buying it.
“Unbelievable jobs numbers..,” he wrote on then-Twitter. “[T]hese Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change numbers.”
The implication was that the numbers were fake, that the economy was faring worse than those numbers would suggest, and…
