Dismal US jobs figures delivered a blow to President Barack Obama’s re-election argument that he has been a steward of recovery, and breathed life into the campaign of his Republican rival, Mitt Romney.

No US president since the Great Depression has sought re-election with unemployment as high as it is now, and past incumbents have lost when the rate was on the rise

Three months of lacklustre growth and a surge in joblessness to 8.2 per cent in May have forced Mr Obama onto the defensive after a winter when the job trends were in his favour.

It also heightened White House anxiety over global threats to US economic growth.

The economy, struggling to recover from the worst recession since the Great Depression, has had to fend off a number of external pressures, from high oil prices to natural disasters and now, economic troubles in Europe and a weakening economy in China.

The unemployment numbers, while imprecise and typically a lagging indicator of economic performance, are nevertheless an undeniable marker of the human cost of a weak economy.

No US president since the Great Depression has sought re-election with unemployment as high as it is now, and past incumbents have lost when the rate was on the rise.

The economy, Mr Obama has conceded, “is not growing as fast as we want it to”.

Taking a harsher tone, Mr Romney declared that the country appeared to be “moving backward”, as he sought to drive home a political point from the nation’s first increase in joblessness in almost a year.

Confronted by a report of just 69,000 new jobs in May, Mr Obama vigorously renewed his demand that Congress step up and enact some of his jobs proposals. He said Republicans had been driven in part by a focus to “beat Obama”, and he hoped winning a second term would change that mentality.

“My hope, my expectation is that after the election, now that it turns out the goal of beating Obama doesn’t make much sense because I’m not running again, that we can start getting some cooperation again,” Mr Obama said.

The president later told donors at a Minneapolis fundraiser that the last four years had been “as tough a period in our country’s history as anything in our lifetimes, certainly since the 1930s”. He said his administration had tried to make “dogged progress” but acknowledged “we’re not out of the woods yet”.

Calling the eurozone’s debt crisis a “shadow” hanging over the US economy, Mr Obama made his most urgent plea yet for measures that would “serve as a buffer in case the situation in Europe gets worse”.

The jobs numbers, issued every month, have become the year’s dominant economic barometer, a baseline from which to gauge Mr Obama’s and Mr Romney’s political fortunes in an election that rides on the pace of recovery.

Mr Romney, responding to the first report since he clinched the Republican presidential nomination, called the figures “devastating news”.

In an interview with CNBC, Mr Romney said the president’s policies and his handling of the economy had “been dealt a harsh indictment”.

Mr Obama was in Minnesota to push his proposal to expand job opportunities for veterans and to raise money for his campaign.

He said private business has created more than four million jobs over the past 27 months, but, he added, “as we learned in today’s jobs report, we’re still not creating them as fast as we want”.

Still, he said, “we will come back stronger; we do have better days ahead”.

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