Good, but not good enough.

As President Obama said himself, that was the message in Friday’s Labor Department report, which showed that the United States economy added 151,000 jobs in October.

The gain was certainly a welcome change after four months of job losses, and was better than what economists had expected. Still, it was not nearly strong enough to make a dent in unemployment. Nearly 15 million people are still out of work, and the unemployment rate remains stubbornly high at 9.6 percent.

The jobless rate has not fallen substantially this year, largely because employers have barely added enough workers to absorb the people just entering the labor force. And even if the economy suddenly expands and starts adding 208,000 jobs a month  as it did in its best year this decade  it would still take 12 years to close the gap between the growing number of American workers and the total available jobs, according to the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project.

The latest numbers underscore the challenges that lie ahead for Washington with a newly divided government and calls by Republican leadership to discredit Mr. Obama’s economic policies. Economists themselves cannot agree about what kinds of policy measures would rescue the job market. Even if a magic-bullet jobs program existed, however, it seems unlikely that a gridlocked Congress could cooperate long enough to put it in place.