Bill Clinton is at it again. Famous for prevarication, the former president recently touted a job creation statistic so incredible he claimed to not believe it at first. Here’s Clinton’s full quote at last week’s Democratic National Convention:

Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, America has created about 51 million new jobs. I swear I checked this three times. Even I couldn’t believe it. What’s the score? Democrats 50, Republicans 1.

Expect to hear more about this claim, as former Clinton campaign guru James Carville this week called it the “most stunning statistic ever,” adding “I can’t get enough of that statistic.” Meanwhile even mainstream media outlets admit Clinton’s claim is “misleading”—and that’s sugarcoating his intentional manipulation of the facts.

The most obvious manipulation involves “since the end of the Cold War in 1989.” What does starting a claim about job creation have to do with that, you might ask? Nothing, unless your goal is to saddle Republican presidents with the negative effects of the 1990–1991 recession and exclude the positive job creation that preceded it. The first 18 months of the George H.W. Bush administration featured 2.7 million net new jobs, but focusing on only post-1989 figures arbitrarily dismisses most of that while spotlighting job losses during the recession that began in July 1990. That’s good if you want a tendentious talking point but bad if you are interested in a fair comparison.

That dynamic is embedded throughout Clinton’s math. In recent decades, the US economy has been a job-creation machine—outside of recessions and a global pandemic. No reasonable person thinks Republicans are responsible for the pandemic that struck the US economy in 2020 or its enormous damage to the US labor market. But Clinton’s talking point holds them solely accountable for unprecedented pandemic job destruction, while giving Democrats credit for much of the inevitable bounceback that followed.

Payroll employment plummeted by an unprecedented 22 million in just two months between February and April 2020. By the time Donald Trump left office in January 2021, over 12 million of those jobs had returned. But the remainder of that massive pandemic-driven decline overwhelmed the nearly seven million jobs created in Trump’s first three years in office, leaving his administration in the red under Clinton’s tally. Meanwhile, over half of the 16 million jobs Clinton implicitly suggests Democrat Joe Biden “created” simply reflect the continued return of positions suspended early in the pandemic. 

Clinton is well aware of the effect of the timing of recessions, having been president during the dot.com bubble that burst into recession in March 2001—just two months after his term ended, soon compounded by the 9/11 attacks. Were those job losses George W. Bush’s fault? In Clinton’s statistic, they all were. The same goes for the Great Recession. About half of the employment decline during the December 2007–June 2009 Great Recession fell at the end of Bush’s second term—while all of the jobs recovery that followed was in Barack Obama’s administration.

History shows how things could have been very different, especially if the pandemic fell during a Democratic administration. Start Clinton’s calculation ten years earlier with Ronald Reagan and assume Hillary Clinton was president when the pandemic struck and then lost to a Republican in 2020. Then Clinton’s job creation figures become 36 million under Republican presidents versus 32 million under Democrats. That admittedly would count 23-plus years of Republican presidents versus 20 years of Democrats—much like Clinton cherry-picks 15 years of Republican administrations versus 19-plus years of Democratic presidents. That longer time frame also recalls when Clinton used the same statistic at the 2012 convention, stretching his claims back to JFK.

Some think this exercise gives presidents too much credit for job creation. Congress matters, too, after all. What happens if we run the same calculation since 1989 by which party controls the House of Representatives? Then Clinton’s talking point becomes 44 million jobs created in 21-plus years of Republican majorities, versus only five million jobs in the 13 years Democrats ran the House. Voila! Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) just got a new campaign talking point. 

That’s proof anyone can have fun with numbers, especially job creation figures highly dependent on the timing of recessions and a global pandemic over which no one—not even the president of the United States—has real control. It also shows how, whenever Bill Clinton says he finds something hard to believe, the rest of us should be even more skeptical. 

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