The increase in unemployment alongside a rise in jobs is a typical anomaly of how labor statistics are generated. Basically, the labor pool (the number of people seeking work) expanded by more than the number of jobs. But the labor pool number is squishy and less meaningful than the jobs number, which is a solid number.
In past months, there have been times when the job number was flat or even falling, but unemployment went down, because the labor pool shrunk and the media would say "people are discouraged and gave up looking for work." Conversely, then, we should say today that the rise of the unemployment rate by 0.1 percent is good news, as it means people are encouraged by job growth to re-enter the labor pool. Dont hold your breath for this interpretation to be given.
One final note: in all those fancy economic models that predict the outcome of presidential elections, the unemployment rate is never a significant factor. General GDP and job growth and the decisive factors. Thats why all those models are now predicting a comfortable Bush win. But of course, those models were wrong about Gore, and have other problems besides.
Hope this helps.
Well, the 3 million jobs lost! comments are now down to 1.8 million jobs lost! This is great news, the big number would be 257,000 a month for 7 months would put that number an even 0 for total jobs created/lost under Bush with a week to go into the elections. People instinctively understand that between a sluggish economy handed to Bush, 9/11, and two wars this is a fairly respectable number. How many independents understand this? Hopefully enough.