Biden on Economy: "We Will Recover," But Corrects Thursday Boast Stimulus Created 1 Million Jobs, Reverts to "Saved or Created"

Vice President Joe Biden, speaking glumly from the White House from note cards, could barely hide his disappointment at today's unemployment report showing 263,000 jobs lost in September and a jobless rate rising to 9.8 percent.

"We knew all along the recovery was going to take a long time," said Biden, sitting in the Roosevelt room with top economic advisers Christina Romer, Larry Summers and budget director Peter Orszag. "We inherited an awful lot of baggage and we knew the recovery would come in fits and starts and job creation would be the last element to come into place. Those are the realities we live with."

Biden said quarterly job loses have fallen from an average of 700,000 in the 1st quarter to 250,000 in the third quarter.

"But less bad is not our measure of success," Biden said. "One job loss is one job to many. There's still too much pain."

Biden said the stimulus has, "by some estimates, saved or created 1 million jobs."

At an event Thursday discussing specific economic benefits of the stimulus, Biden said this: "...we've created what we said we would create, actually a little more than we were -- we said we'd be able to create in the first 200 days, we think over a million jobs."

Whatever the number of jobs saved or created, Biden said it's clear the US economy would be reeling without the $787 billion two-year stimulus.

"Today's bad news does not change my confidence in the fact that we are going to recover we are going to be producing jobs," Biden said. "I believe we are doing the right things to move things in the right direction. This is not a a straight line to recovery, but we are recovering, we will recover."

Biden was far more circumspect in today's remarks than in a conference call Sept. 24 with 30 governors when he said this about the stimulus: "in my wildest dreams I never thought it would work this well."

In fairness, part of Biden's optimism was linked to a recent Government Accountability Office report on the relative efficiency of stimulus spending. Read a summary of that report here