Jim Tankersley:

Well, let's — yes, let's start from the last one and move backwards.

The unemployment rate is lower than it's been in half-a-century, absolutely true. Also important to note, though, that it started pretty low. He inherited an unemployment rate of less than 5 percent. Not a lot of presidents in recent years have inherited a rate like that, and been able to continue an expansion.

So the president starts with low rate and has seen it go even lower.

On the job creation front, he's putting a lot of stock there in a 2016 report by the Congressional Budget Office, which thought that job growth was going to slow when sort of the expansion kind of petered out maybe or slipped into a low growth phase.

But it turns out the economy just has more room to run, and with the tax cuts and spending increases that he's signed into law, there was more fiscal stimulus and more room to grow.