The release of the jobs report Friday morning sparked a fresh round of rhetoric as both parties attempt to spin the numbers to their advantage in the three weeks left before election day.

Soon after the job numbers were released, President Obama addressed the news from a small brick-and-masonry company in Bladensburg, Md. The president said that the job losses in government would have been worse if not for stimulus legislation he pushed for and then signed in August that provided $28 billion to state and local governments.

Austan Goolsbee, the chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, said in a White House blog post that “this growth provides more evidence that the economy continues to recover, but we must do more to put the economy on a path of robust economic growth.”

Republicans, too, reacted quickly to the jobs figures. Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader from Kentucky, issued a statement that said “the trillion-dollar stimulus didn’t live up to promises made by the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress; the massive growth of the federal government didn’t result in a similar growth of jobs; and the maze of new regulations, health care mandates and taxes are having a predictable impact on the economy.”

Other Democrats offering a final economic argument included David Plouffe, who managed President Obama’s 2008 campaign and remains a top political adviser. Mr. Plouffe told reporters on Thursday that his party’s candidates should confront anger about the economic crisis head on — and then blame Republicans.

“Listen, you know, the unemployment rate is what it is,” Mr. Plouffe said in answer to a question about the jobs report. “The economic situation is what it is. What we want people to focus on is: are we moving slowly in the right direction?”

Mr. Plouffe repeated what Mr. Obama has said repeatedly — that the recovery is moving too slowly for anyone’s comfort. But he said that in the final weeks of the election, Democratic candidates should quickly pivot to the responsibility that Republicans bear for creating the economic crisis.



“The Republicans here in Washington act as if they were bystanders to this whole thing. It was their policies that were a chief contributor to this,” Mr. Plouffe said. He added that before Mr. Obama came into office, “we were losing 700,000 jobs a month under the same economic policies that the Republicans want to bring back.”

Republicans scoff at that argument and say they believe the voters will reject it at the polls. They note that the unemployment rate was 7.6 percent when Mr. Obama took office. And they point out that the Congress has been in Democratic control since January of 2007.

“Virtually every single piece of major legislation Democrat leaders in Washington have proposed over the past 19 months has made it either harder for businesses to hire new workers or retain the workers they already have,” Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader from Kentucky, said over the weekend. “And now they want to make it even worse.”

Surveys suggest that the Republican case has made headway with the American public. By large margins, a healthy majority of people say the country is headed on the wrong track.

But Mr. Plouffe said he remained optimistic that the Republicans had made as much traction as they were likely to make with that argument. In a nutshell, he said that the conservative wave had peaked a month before Election Day.

“They are going to have very good turnout,” Mr. Plouffe predicted. But he said: “I don’t see that getting a lot better for them. The point is, I don’t see another surge here.”

Mr. Obama took Mr. Plouffe’s advice at a rally in Maryland on Thursday. He acknowledged that there were “still millions of families who can barely pay the bills or make a mortgage.” But he spent most of his time lashing out at the Republicans.

“Of course people are frustrated. People are impatient with the pace of change. They want things to move a little quicker. I understand that. I’m impatient, too,” Mr. Obama said. “But the other side, they don’t have an answer. All they have decided to do is to ride that frustration and that anger all the way to the ballot box.”