I don’t try to be up to date in American politics such as the upcoming presidential election in 2012, but I did come across this picture with the following caption, “Mitt Romney claimed this morning that he created more jobs in Massachusetts as governor ‘than this president’s created in the entire country.’ This chart shows the reality of President Obama’s strong record on job creation—21 straight months of it. Share it with your friends to get the truth out.”

I’m sure Obama’s campaign staff are quite competent (since after all, Obama became president), but I have no idea what those numbers on the vertical axis means.  On the top right corner it does say “Private sector monthly change, thousands” and then beneath it, it says,  “Total, excluding census”, which leads me to believe that that is a legend, but isn’t a monthly change in jobs different than the total number of jobs?  Am I reading it wrong?  With two entries in the legend, I thought I would see two graphs.  When it says “monthly change”, I’m assuming they refer to the “monthly change in jobs”, but it isn’t explicitly said.  The title implies that the units of the vertical axis are in numbers of jobs.

According to the caption, it seemed like the campaigners wanted to show that Obama did in fact create more jobs than Mitt Romney, but the chart doesn’t show that.  The graph just shows job creation differences between the two administrations over time.  It doesn’t show Mitt Romney’s personal contribution to job creation.

The graph does show the democrats in a positive light psychologically since jobs created being larger than zero is generally seen as a good thing.  Even if I don’t understand the units being shown there, it is a weapon to be used in the battle for the administration.

I thought making graphs were supposed to make things easier for people to understand?  Only if it is labeled properly.