Buy My Booklet - Dowd Cloud and Welching!

Dick Berkowitz, has written a booklet entitled:"A Conservative Capitalist Offers: Eleven Lessons and a Bonus Lesson for Raising America's Youth Born and Yet To Be Born" Half The Proceeds Go To "The Wounded Warrior Project!" 

By Dick Berkowitz - Non Expert

Dick wrote this booklet because he believes a strong country must rest on a solid family unit and that Brokaw's "Greatest Generation" has morphed into "A Confused, Dependent and Compromised Generation."

He  hopes this booklet will provide a guide to alter this trend.

You can now order a .pdf version from www.brokerberko.com/book that you can download and read on your computer, or print out if you want. Cost is $5.99

In several weeks the book will be available in soft cover format at a cost of $10.99. 

Booklet illustrations were by his oldest granddaughter, Emma Darvick, who lives and works in New York.

Testimonials:

Dick, I read your book this weekend.  I hardly know where to start.  You did an excellent job of putting into one short book a compendium of the virtues which only a relatively short time ago all Americans believed.  It’s a measure of how far we have fallen that many Americans, perhaps a majority of Americans, no longer believe in what we once considered truisms.  I think your father would have agreed with every word, but the party he supported no longer has such beliefs.

  

I would like to buy multiple copies of your booklet..

You did a great job.  I know your parents would have been proud and that your family today is proud.

Mike

You wrote a great book.  The brevity is one of its strong points and I know it was hard to include that in and still keep it brief.  Your father in haste once wrote an overly long letter to our client, then said in the last sentence, “I’m sorry I wrote such a long letter, but I didn’t have time to write a short one.”

"Dick, I indeed marvel at how much wisdom you have been able to share with so few words.  Not too unlike the experience in reading the Bible. I feel that with each read of "A Conservative Capitalist Offers:…." one will gain additional knowledge and new insights…

Regards, Larry"

Dick , 
Your book is outstanding! Due to illness, I've been unable to read it in entirety until today .Your background is often very similar to mine (e.g. Halliburton's influence was very important in my life), and your thoughts reflect very closely the the teachings that I received from my parents and granddad. I will write a more detailed statement in the near future!
All the best,
Bob

Dick attended Georgia Military Academy, in Atlanta, graduating in 1950. He attended The Wharton School of Commerce graduating in 1954, served both a stint in the Marine Corps Active reserves and The Army Finance Corps.  

Upon completing his tour of service he enrolled in The University of Miami Law School (was an associate editor of The Law Review)  graduated in 1960, moved to Atlanta and began his Wall Street career as a stock broker with Courts and Company and became a general partner in 1967.  When Courts merged he opened an Atlanta Office for Burnham and Company in 1970 and when Drexel Burnham demised, in 1990, he took the institutional department , he created, to Oppenheimer going into semi-retirement in 2006 (he still manages money for some clients.).  

Dick resides with his wife of 40 years - Lynn Rudikoff, At The Landings on Skidaway Island near Savannah.

He has three daughters from a former marriage, a son and daughter with Lynn and 7 grandchildren.

During his working career, Dick was a member of The Board of St John's College for nine years (The Great Books School) served on The President's Commission on White House Fellowships during the elder Bush's Administration, and served on the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Board among many other public activities.

After moving to Savannah in 2003, Dick, began The JEA Speaker Series, continues to serve on the Board of The State of Georgia's Museum (GMOA) located on the campus at Athens, is on the advisory board of Spine and Sport and The Skidaway Island Republican Club.  Dick also serves on the investment committee board of the Savannah Jewish Federation.

He recently underwent a knee replacement in the hope that he can continue playing tennis.  

Dick also posts to a web page (dick-meom.blogspot.com) on a daily basis focusing on The Middle East, politics and economics.

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Tom Sowell comments positively on Coulter's book "Mugge" which deals with  on politicians playing race card. (See 1 below.)
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Charlie Wilson once said "So Goes General Motors, So Goes America.'  

Perhaps it can be replaced with "So Goes California, So Goes America." (See 2 below.)
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Has the air gone out of the Obama balloon and is it no more fun now that the emperor is being challenged and found naked?  (See 3 below.)
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You can be loved too much and then smothered to death as the air is sucked out of your body.  (See 4 below.)
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Obama now under Dowd cloud?  (See 5 below.)
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Welching on employment data!  (See 6 below.)
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Dick

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1)Race Cards

• 
 Tom Sowell

If you are sick and tired of seeing politicians and others playing the race card, or if you are just disgusted with the grossly dishonest way racial issues in general are portrayed, then you should get a copy of Ann Coulter's new book, "Mugged." Its subtitle is: "Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama."

Few things are as rare as an honest book about race. This is one of the very few, and one of the very best.

Many people will learn for the first time from Ann Coulter's book how a drunken hoodlum and ex-convict, who tried to attack the police, was turned into a victim and a martyr by the media, simply by editing a videotape and broadcasting that edited version, over and over, across the nation.

They will learn how a jury -- which saw the whole unedited videotape and acquitted the police officers of wrongdoing -- was portrayed as racist, setting off riots that killed innocent people who had nothing to do with the Rodney King episode.

Meanwhile, the people whose slick editing set off this chain of events received a Pulitzer Prize.

Even the Republican President of the United States, George H.W. Bush, expressed surprise at the jury's verdict, after seeing the edited videotape, while the jury saw the whole unedited videotape. Even Presidents should keep their mouths shut when they don't know all the facts. Perhaps especially Presidents.

Innumerable other examples of racial events and issues that have been twisted and distorted beyond recognition are untangled and revealed for the frauds that they are in "Mugged."

The whole history of the role of the Democrats and the Republicans in black civil rights issues is taken apart and examined, showing with documented fact after documented fact how the truth turns out repeatedly to be the opposite of what has been portrayed in most of the media.

It has long been a matter of official record that a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats, in both Houses of Congress, voted for the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Yet the great legend has come down to us that Democrats created the civil rights revolution, over the opposition of the Republicans.

Since this all happened nearly half a century ago, even many Republicans today seem unaware of the facts, and are defensive about their party's role on racial issues, while Democrats boldly wrap themselves in the mantle of blacks' only friends and defenders.

To puff up their role as defenders of blacks, it has been necessary for Democrats and their media supporters to hype the dangers of "racists." This has led to some very creative ways of defining and portraying people as "racists." Ann Coulter has a whole chapter titled "You Racist!" with examples of how extreme and absurd this organized name-calling can become.

No book about race would be complete without an examination of the role of character assassination in racial politics. One of the classic injustices revealed by Ann Coulter's book is the case of Charles Pickering, a white Republican in Mississippi, who prosecuted the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s.

Back in those days, opposing the Ku Klux Klan meant putting your life, and the lives of your family members, at risk. The FBI had to guard Pickering and his family. Later, Pickering went on to become a federal judge and, in 2001, President George W. Bush nominated him for promotion to the Circuit Court of Appeals.

As a Republican judge, Pickering was opposed by elite liberal Democrats in Congress and in the media who, in Ann Coulter's words, "sent their children to 99-percent white private schools" while "Pickering sent his kids to overwhelmingly black Mississippi public schools."

Among the charges against Pickering was that he was bad on civil rights issues. Older black leaders in Mississippi, who had known Pickering for years, sprang to his defense. But who cared what they said? Pickering's nomination was defeated on a smear.

"Mugged" is more than an informative book. It is a whole education about the difference between rhetoric and reality when it comes to racial issues. It is a much needed, and even urgently needed education, with a national election just weeks away.

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2)-A Modest Proposal

• 
 
• Walter E. Williams 

California was once the land of opportunity, but it is going down the tubes. Several of California's prominent cities have declared bankruptcy, such as Vallejo, Stockton, Mammoth Lakes and San Bernardino. Others are on the precipice, and that includes Los Angeles, California's largest city. California's 2012 budget deficit is expected to top $28 billion, and its state debt is $618 billion. That's more than twice the size of New York's state debt, which itself is the second-highest in the nation.

Democrats control California's Legislature, and its governor, Jerry Brown, is a Democrat. California is home to some of America's richest people and companies. It would then appear that the liberals' solution to deficit and debt would be easy. They need only to raise taxes on California's rich to balance the budget and pay down the debt -- or, as President Barack Obama would say, make the rich pay their fair share.

The downside to such a tax strategy is the fact that people are already leaving California in great numbers. According to a Manhattan Institute study, "The Great California Exodus: A Closer Look," by Thomas Gray and Robert Scardamalia (October 2012), roughly 225,000 residents leave California each year -- and have done so for the past 10 years. They take their money with them. Using census and Internal Revenue Service data, Gray and Scardamalia estimate that California's out-migration results in large shares of income going to other states, mostly to Nevada ($5.67 billion), Arizona ($4.96 billion), Texas ($4.07 billion) and Oregon ($3.85 billion). That's the problem. California politicians can fleece people in 2012, but there's no guarantee that they can do the same in 2013 and later years; people can leave. Also, keep in mind that rich people didn't become rich by being stupid. They have ingenious ways to hide their money.

California has one-eighth of the nation's population but one-third of its welfare recipients. According to Businessweek, "it is one of the few states that continue to provide welfare checks for children once their parents are no longer eligible." There's nothing new about the handout strategy. As far back as 140 B.C., Roman politicians found that the way to win votes is to give out cheap food and entertainment, what came to be known as "bread and circuses."

Given the widespread contempt for personal liberty and constitutional values, there might be a way for California politicians to solve their fiscal mess. They can simply stop wealthy people from leaving the state or, alternatively, like some Third World nations, set limits on the amount of assets a resident can take out of the state. This would surely be within their jurisdiction and would not raise any constitutional issues, because it would serve a compelling state purpose. In other words, if California were to set up border controls to stop people, as East Germans did at Checkpoint Charlie, before they cross the state line, such action would be protected by the 10th Amendment.

The fact that many Californians have managed to get their assets out of the state complicates the issue. Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution authorizes Congress "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes." This is known as the commerce clause. There's no question that people who pull up stakes and leave California affect interstate commerce; California has less tax revenue, and recipient states have more. What California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris might do is sue Nevada, Arizona, Texas and Oregon in the federal courts for enticing, through lower taxes and less onerous regulations, wealthy California taxpayers.

Were California to take such measures and have a modicum of success, one wonders how many Americans would be offended by such an encroachment on personal liberty. After all, how would forcing an American to remain in a state differ in principle from forcing him to purchase health insurance?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3)How Does a President Quit?

By Monty Pelerin

What does a politician, deeply involved in a campaign, do if he wants to quit? 

That may be the issue Barack Obama is dealing with.  A few months ago, everything looked rosy.  The Republican Party nominated the man he wanted to run against.  His popularity, though not as high as when first elected, pointed to an easy re-election.  Then matters turned:

• The economy weakened.
• Ethical and judgmental issues began to surface.
• Foreign policy turned disastrous.
• Mitt Romney was not Caspar Milquetoast.

Politics is not croquet.  It is a one-on-one contest.  It can be brutal.  People try to earn a living by beating up on other people.

Political debates are the equivalent of boxing matches.  Candidates vie for supremacy via verbal jousting.  Seventy million people witnessed the first debate.  It was an old-fashioned beat-down -- one man figuratively administering a thrashing to the other.  Obama was shown to be under-sized, under-equipped, and under-trained.  Had it been a boxing match, it would have been stopped inside three rounds.

Fans of both sides were surprised by the one-sided outcome.  Obama rooters suffered two surprises. They underestimated the opponent and vastly overestimated their guy.  Romney fans had one surprise, and it was a pleasant one -- they underestimated their guy.  Objective political observers were probably more surprised by the performance of Romney than they were by the collapse of Obama.

As I watched the first Romney-Obama debate, it reminded me of a boxing match that took place on February 25, 1964.  It was the first championship fight for Cassius Clay.  Clay, like Romney, was a prohibitive underdog, entering the ring as a 7:1 underdog.  Most people gave him no chance.

Sonny Liston was the heavyweight champion of the world -- a brute of a man.  Liston was an ex-con whom many fighters were afraid to engage.  He was a one-man wrecking ball.  He was tough, strong and mean.  Compared to him, Mike Tyson could pass for a choir boy.  Liston's scowl was enough to make most men take an automatic eight-count.

Clay was a young, scrawny, mouthy kid with fast hands and feet.  Next to Liston, he looked like he had not yet attained puberty.  Nevertheless, he taunted this bear of a man for months before the fight.  Some people questioned Clay's sanity.  Howard Cosell, a giant among the sports media and bigger than a giant in his own mind, thought that Liston literally might kill the young challenger in the ring.

Clay came out and immediately took control of the fight.  He danced in and out, staying away from the powerful but slow Liston.  Clay's speed and dexterity nullified Liston's skills.  Methodically Clay picked Goliath apart.  Liston had no answer for Clay's movement.  Frustrated and unable to deal with the challenger, Liston quit.  He surrendered his crown from his corner rather than come out for the seventh round.  Complete coverage of this fight can be seen here.

This fight kept flashing through my mind as I watched the debate unfold.  In terms of expectations, Romney was a serious underdog.  He was up against a supposed formidable giant, self-described as our fourth-best president and smarter than all his advisers.  The consensus of the media was this debate was a mismatch of Clay-Liston proportions.

Romney, like Clay, came out and took control.  Obama had no answer for Romney's offense.  Like Liston, Obama quit.  The debate lasted for an hour and a half, but Obama seemingly gave up around the halfway point.  He was frustrated, defenseless, and beaten.

There are two more presidential debates.  The pugilistic history of Clay (now Ali) and Liston might provide some guidance.  Their second boxing match turned out worse for Liston.  He was knocked out in the first round, felled by a "phantom punch," as seen in this video.

The second presidential debate will likely not be as decisive as the first.  President Obama will not quit.  But the parallel between the boxers and the debaters has value.  Liston knew he was beaten in the first fight and quit.  Liston likely came to the second fight for a payday, probably knowing he could not win.  He knew that Ali was better.  Obama, despite all his arrogance, probably realizes he cannot win against Romney.  For a man accustomed to being in charge, that realization has to provide great discomfort.

The next debate with its town hall format may serve Obama better than the one-on-one of the first debate.  Obama may be able to dance, but as Joe Louis observed, "he can run but he can't hide."  Obama's problem is reality.  Facts to Obama are like kryptonite to Superman -- lethal!

The Rematch

There are two more presidential debates.  For Clay (his name for the second fight had become Mohammed Ali), there was to be one more fight against Liston.  The second boxing match turned out worse for Liston.

When there is no more fire in the belly and you are outclassed in every respect by your opponent, what do you do?  How does Obama have his "No más" moment gracefully?  Or did we witness it already when he quit partway through the first debate?

Does the man who pretended to be president now pretend to be a candidate.

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4)The liberal media loved Obama to death

It was in Denver one week ago that the long-running romance between Barack Obama and the national press -- aka the "Slobbering Love Affair," as Bernard Goldberg put it -- hit the wall. The motel bill, unpaid these many long months and ages, at long last came due.

It had been the real thing, not a commonplace fling with your generic Democrat, but the love of a lifetime, the genuine article, the sum of all dreams: He was not just a Democrat, he was also a liberal. He was not just a liberal, he also biracial, also multinational; also hip, cool, and clever. He was themselves as they wanted to be. Like them, he was gifted at writing and talking (and, as it turned out, not much beyond that), like them, he stood up for Metro America; like them, he viewed the people outside it with a not-very-measured disdain. "I divide people into people who talk like us and people who don't talk like us," said David Brooks, speaking for all of them. "You could see him as a New Republic writer ... he's more talented than anyone in my lifetime ... he IS pretty dazzling when he walks into a room."

Dazzled indeed, they turned on their old flames, Bill and Hillary Clinton. They dumped John McCain, with whom they had flirted; and when Romney appeared -- rich, square, and looking like Dad in a mid-50s sitcom -- it was clear the long knives would be out.

And so they attacked him, on all of the critical issues. He was rich; he cut the hair of a schoolmate in prep school; he was rich; he transported his dog in a sinister manner; he was rich; he managed somehow to give some people cancer; he was rich; and he failed to make friends with his garbage collector (as Obama undoubtedly had). Oh, and he was rich.

On Sept. 12, the day after mobs ransacked American embassies, burned the flag and Obama in effigy, and killed one Marine, two Navy SEALs, and one ambassador, NBC's Chuck Todd took to the air almost in shock and seemingly tearful, because Romney critiqued an official in Cairo who apologized for provoking the riots, citing a barely-seen YouTube video as the pretext for the violence. Voice shaking, he channeled the shock on the part of the White House (which later itself condemned the apology).

For days after, Romney's "mistake" was the story. On Sunday, after a week in which Obama was burned in effigy on several continents and his Middle Eastern policy exposed as a failure, he lost his best (perhaps his sole) campaign issue, and questions were raised about criminal negligence. But Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post said that Mitt Romney had had "the worst week in Washington." Obama's failures had turned out to hurt Romney, most of the press corps agreed.

Obama had seen that his friends would protect him, and so he believed he could mail it in Wednesday, but this was the venue that could not be spun. No filter. No edits. No choosing what to put in or leave out. No shaping of the story. Just the story itself, rolled out in real time, sans narration, before 70 million American voters, undoing six years of hype and hysterics. It revealed one small, not all that keen academic, having been inflated by the narrators beyond all recognition, dissolving before everyone's eyes.

Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of "Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families."-

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------5)Barry Trails Off . . .

By MAUREEN DOWD

• 
  

President Obama likes to be alone.

When he speaks at rallies, he doesn’t want the stage cluttered with other officeholders. When he rides in his limo, he isn’t prone to give local pols a lift. He wants to feel that he doesn’t owe his ascension to anyone else — not a rich daddy, not a spouse or father who was president, not even those who helped at pivotal moments. He believes he could do any job in his White House or campaign, from speechwriter to policy director, better than those holding the jobs.

So Obama knows that he alone is responsible for his unfathomable retreat into his own head while 70 million people watched. He hadn’t been nailing it in debate prep either, taking a break to visit the Hoover Dam, and worried aides knew his head wasn’t in it. When the president realized what a dud he was, he apologized to flummoxed and irritated advisers.

Once during the 2008 campaign, reading about all the cataclysms jolting the economy and the world, Obama joked to an adviser: “Maybe I should throw the game.” This time, he actually threw the game. And shaved points right off his poll ratings. The president is good at analyzing the psychology of other world leaders, and he wrote an acclaimed memoir about his long, lonely odyssey of self-discovery. But he doesn’t always do a good job at analyzing his own psychology to avoid self-destructive patterns.

David Maraniss, who wrote biographies of Bill Clinton and Obama, said that both men had recurring themes. Clinton would plant “the seeds of his own undoing” and then “find a way to recover.” Obama’s personality, Maraniss said, was shaped by his desire to avoid traps created by his unusual family and geographical backgrounds, and the trap of race in America.

“It helped explain his caution, his tendency to hold back and survey life like a chessboard, looking for where he might get checkmated,” Maraniss wrote in “Barack Obama: The Story,” adding that it also made Obama seek to transcend confrontation.

While Mitt Romney did a great job of conjuring a less off-putting and hard-right Romney, Obama walked into a trap of his own devising.

It was a perfect psychological storm for the president. He performs better when his back is against the wall; he has some subconscious need to put himself in challenging positions. That makes it hard for him to surf success and intensity; he just suddenly runs out of gas and stops fighting, leaving revved up supporters confused and deflated. “That’s just his rhythm,” said one adviser.

Because Obama doesn’t relish confrontation, he often fails to pin his opponents on the mat the first time he gets the chance; instead, perversely, he pulls back and allows foes to gain oxygen. It happened with Hillary in New Hampshire and Texas and with Republicans in the health care and debt-ceiling debates. Just as Obama let the Tea Party inflate in the summer of 2009, spreading a phony narrative about “death panels,” now he has let Romney inflate and spread a phony narrative about moderation and tax math.

Even though Obama was urged not to show his pompous side, he arrived at the podium cloaked in layers of disdain; a disdain for debates, which he regards as shams, a venue, as the Carter White House adviser Gerry Rafshoon puts it, where “people prefer a good liar to a bad performer.”

Obama feels: Seriously? After all he did mopping up Republican chaos, does he really have to spend weeks practicing a canned zinger? Should the man who killed Osama bin Laden and personally reviews drone strikes have to put on a show of macho swagger?

Plus, he’s filled with disdain for Romney, seeing him as the ultimate slick boardroom guy born on third base trying to peddle money-making deals. Surely everyone sees through this con man?

Just as Poppy Bush didn’t try as hard as he should have because he assumed voters would reject Slick Willie, Obama lapsed into not trying because he assumed voters would reject Cayman Mitt.

The president averted his eyes as glittering opportunities passed, even when Romney sent a lob his way with a reference to his accountant.

Obama has been coddled by Valerie Jarrett, the adviser who sat next to Michelle at the debate, instead of the more politically strategic choice of local pols and their spouses. Jarrett believes that everyone must woo the prodigy who deigns to guide us, not the other way around.

At a fund-raising concert in San Francisco Monday night, the president mocked Romney’s star turn, saying “what was being presented wasn’t leadership; that’s salesmanship.”

It is that distaste for salesmanship that caused Obama not to sell or even explain health care and economic policies; and it is that distaste that caused him not to sell himself and his policies at the debate. His latest fund-raising plea is marked “URGENT.” But in refusing to muster his will and energy, and urgently sell his vision, he underscores his own lapses in leadership and undermines arguments for four more years.

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6)Jack Welch: I Was Right About That Strange Jobs Report

The economy would need to be growing at breakneck speed for unemployment to drop to 7.8% from 8.3% in the course of two months.

By JACK WELCH

Imagine a country where challenging the ruling authorities—questioning, say, a piece of data released by central headquarters—would result in mobs of administration sympathizers claiming you should feel "embarrassed" and labeling you a fool, or worse.

Soviet Russia perhaps? Communist China? Nope, that would be the United States right now, when a person (like me, for instance) suggests that a certain government datum (like the September unemployment rate of 7.8%) doesn't make sense.

Unfortunately for those who would like me to pipe down, the 7.8% unemployment figure released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) last week is downright implausible. And that's why I made a stink about it.

Before I explain why the number is questionable, though, a few words about where I'm coming from. Contrary to some of the sound-and-fury last week, I do not work for the Mitt Romney campaign. I am definitely not a surrogate. My wife, Suzy, is not associated with the campaign, either. She worked at Bain Consulting (not Bain Capital) right after business school, in 1988 and 1989, and had no contact with Mr. Romney.

The Obama campaign and its supporters, including bigwigs like David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs, along with several cable TV anchors, would like you to believe that BLS data are handled like the gold in Fort Knox, with gun-carrying guards watching their every move, and highly trained, white-gloved super-agents counting and recounting hourly.

Let's get real. The unemployment data reported each month are gathered over a one-week period by census workers, by phone in 70% of the cases, and the rest through home visits. In sum, they try to contact 60,000 households, asking a list of questions and recording the responses.

The possibility of subjectivity creeping into the process is so pervasive that the BLS's own "Handbook of Methods" has a full page explaining the limitations of its data, including how non-sampling errors get made, from "misinterpretation of the questions" to "errors made in the estimations of missing data."

Bottom line: To suggest that the input to the BLS data-collection system is precise and bias-free is—well, let's just say, overstated.

Even if the BLS had a perfect process, the context surrounding the 7.8% figure still bears serious skepticism. Consider the following:

In August, the labor-force participation rate in the U.S. dropped to 63.5%, the lowest since September 1981. By definition, fewer people in the workforce leads to better unemployment numbers. That's why the unemployment rate dropped to 8.1% in August from 8.3% in July.

Meanwhile, we're told in the BLS report that in the months of August and September, federal, state and local governments added 602,000 workers to their payrolls, the largest two-month increase in more than 20 years. And the BLS tells us that, overall, 873,000 workers were added in September, the largest one-month increase since 1983, during the booming Reagan recovery.

These three statistics—the labor-force participation rate, the growth in government workers, and overall job growth, all multidecade records achieved over the past two months—have to raise some eyebrows. There were no economists, liberal or conservative, predicting that unemployment in September would drop below 8%.

I know I'm not the only person hearing these numbers and saying, "Really? If all that's true, why are so many people I know still having such a hard time finding work? Why do I keep hearing about local, state and federal cutbacks?"

I sat through business reviews of a dozen companies last week as part of my work in the private sector, and not one reported better results in the third quarter compared with the second quarter. Several stayed about the same, the rest were down slightly.

The economy is not in a free-fall. Oil and gas are strong, automotive is doing well and we seem to be seeing the beginning of a housing comeback. But I doubt many of us know any businessperson who believes the economy is growing at breakneck speed, as it would have to be for unemployment to drop to 7.8% from 8.3% over the course of two months.

The reality is the economy is experiencing a weak recovery. Everything points to that, particularly the overall employment level, which is 143 million people today, compared with 146 million people in 2007.

Now, I realize my tweets about this matter have been somewhat incendiary. In my first tweet, sent the night before the unemployment figure was released, I wrote: "Tomorrow unemployment numbers for Sept. with all the assumptions Labor Department can make..wonder about participation assumption??" The response was a big 

yawn.

My next tweet, on Oct. 5, the one that got the attention of the Obama campaign and its supporters, read: "Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can't debate so change numbers."

As I said that same evening in an interview on CNN, if I could write that tweet again, I would have added a few question marks at the end, as with my earlier tweet, to make it clear I was raising a question.

But I'm not sorry for the heated debate that ensued. I'm not the first person to question government numbers, and hopefully I won't be the last. Take, for example, one of my chief critics in this go-round, Austan Goolsbee, former chairman of the Obama administration's Council of Economic Advisers. Back in 2003, Mr. Goolsbee himself, commenting on a Bush-era unemployment figure, wrote in a New York Times op-ed: "the government has cooked the books."

The good news is that the current debate has resulted in people giving the whole issue of unemployment data more thought. Moreover, it led to some of the campaign's biggest supporters admitting that the number merited a closer look—and even expressing skepticism. The New York Times in a Sunday editorial, for instance, acknowledged the 7.8% figure is "partly due to a statistical fluke."

The coming election is too important to be decided on a number. Especially when that number seems so wrong.

Mr. Welch was the CEO of General Electric for 21 years and is the founder of the Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University.

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