1) In a free economy like the United State's the chief of the executive branch has very very little effect on job creation and employment numbers. This is the case with Reagan, Clinton, Bush, Obama, etc. Whether they take credit for positive movement in employment or run from the blame associated with negative movement, the white house ultimately has little effect on short term employment numbers. 2) One of the things that you should take from your own links is that reading into the employment data is very complicated. There are positive signs and negative signs. The US created a large number of jobs over the last two months (more than expected), but over the last couple years a significant number of people have dropped completely out of the job market (the BLS graph shows one aspect of this). Unfortunately there seems to be increasing amount of data that the employment problems in the US have alot more to do with structural unemployment rather than slow economic growth.