Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is having serious trouble with his reelection campaign. On Friday, he made things worse -- and he did no favors for every other Democrat running this year.
Speaking on the Senate floor about February's jobs report, which showed a loss of 36,000 jobs for the month, Reid had this to say:
Today is a big day in America. Only 36,000 people lost their jobs today, which is really good.
D'oh.
To add insult to injury -- or, really, to add injury to injury -- there's video of Reid saying this. (It's below.) As Taegan Goddard observed, you can bet that clip will be featured in some Republican campaign ads this year.
Update: Reid's office is now attempting to minimize the fallout from this. His spokesman, Jim Manley, sent Politico this statement:
Respected publications like the Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones and Bloomberg News reported that as many as 75,000 people were expected to have lost their jobs in February. Fortunately it turned out to be much lower than that. Only those Republicans who would root for failure would refuse to acknowledge any progress at all. Senator Reid knows there is much more work to do, which is why he led passage last week of the latest in a series of jobs bills that will create or save more than a million jobs.
And then there was this, on Reid's Twitter account:
Going from 750K job losses to 36K is a step in the right direction but I don't pretend for a minute that it's enough. Much work still to do.
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