Unemployment rose to 8.2 percent in May after the economy added only 69,000 jobs, leaving Democratic economists running away from rosy jobs predictions.
Moody’s chief economist and registered Democrat Mark Zandi told the Hill that the May slide is only the beginning.
"There is nothing very redeeming about this report, it's pretty ugly all the way around," said Mark Zandi, adding, "No matter how you slice it, it suggests that the economy's growth rate has slowed going into the spring and summer."
That is a far cry from the triumphalism Zandi predicted on May 17:
"We have raised our outlook for net U.S. nonfarm payroll growth in May to 170,000 jobs, up from the 165,000 forecast last week, and an improvement over the 115,000 recorded by the Labor Department for April."
Just hours before the unemployment numbers were released, Zandi told CNBC that "we've been getting consistently upward revisions to the data, an average of about 30, 35,000…I think in all likelihood the unemployment rate will be well south of 8 percent by election day."
Zandi has gone to bat several times for Obama in the past, calling House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) "just wrong" about the stimulus and endorsing Obama’s $450 million Jobs Bill.
May’s jobs numbers reflect the slowest growth in more than a year. The news sent the stock market into a free fall in the first hour of trading, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted nearly 1.5 percent.