Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders bemoaned the state of the (Obama) economy this week, saying, “When you talk about the economy we also have to have an honest assessment of unemployment in America. Once a month the government publishes a set of figures, and the last figures they published said that official unemployment was 5.4% [sic; it was 5.3%]. But there is another set of government statistics, and … if you include those people who have given up looking for work and the millions of others who are working part-time 20, 25 hours a week when they want to work full-time — when you all of that together, real unemployment is 10.5 percent.”

By contrast, Barack Obama was more than happy to trumpet his so-called recovery, boasting, “[O]ur businesses created another 223,000 jobs last month. And the unemployment rate is now down to 5.3%. Keep in mind, when I came into office it was hovering around 10%. All told, we’ve now seen 64 straight months of private sector job growth, which is a new record — 12.8 million new jobs all told. And that’s good. But we’ve got more work to do because we’ve got to get folks’ wages and incomes to keep going up. We’ve got to make sure folks feel like their hard work is getting them somewhere. And let’s face it, there are a lot of folks who still feel like the playing field is tilted in ways that make it hard for them to get ahead.”

So we have a Democrat (yeah, we know, Sanders is an “independent”) trying to keep the White House under his party’s control by telling people that the current Democrat isn’t doing so well. And the Democrat now in the Oval Office complains that, even after most of his two terms, the “playing field is tilted.” If this were two Republicans, it’s all we’d hear about for weeks.