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 President Barack Obama continues to mislead the American public by under reporting the unemployment statistics in the nation. This deliberate attempt to conceal the true unemployment picture is intended to convince the voter that all is well and the economy is recovering. In fact, a closer examination of the true statistics, reveal nothing is further from the truth.  

Through effective data-twisting from the White House and their compliant allies in the news media, the Bureau of Labor Statistics'  reports the unemployment rate at 8.3 percent, when in fact it is closer to 15.1 percent according to leading economists. One inescapable fact continues to hound the president. No president has won re- election since the Great Depression when the unemployment rate was more than 8 percent.But a 15.1 percent unemployment rate makes the prospect of a second term much more remote.

 Dig deeper into the unemployment stats  and you will find that the real-honest-to-God national jobless rate is much higher than 8.3 percent  because the true picture includes numbers BLS leaves out of its employment equation.

The BLS does not include in its unemployment statistics the number of Americans that has given up looking for a job and dropped out of the workforce and those who are forced to take temp jobs or are working fewer hours. The under employed seem to be the forgotten Americans in the latest unemployment stats.

In January the president made the announcement the economy was improving and more than 300,000 jobs had been created in December. What he failed to mention was that these jobs were seasonal jobs and temporary. He also failed to mention that working age adults not participating in the labor force--those neither employed nor looking for work -- increased by 88,000."

More ominous for Obama and his bid to be a two-term president is that most economic forecasters do not see the jobless rate falling below 8 percent by November. The economy appears to be slowing down and with it, new job creation, economists say.

"Going forward, unemployment is not likely to fall much further and could rise again," says University of Maryland's Business School economist Peter Morici, who has been severely critical of the president's sorry jobs record.

"Fourth-quarter growth was stronger as the global economy recovered from first-half disruptions such as the earthquake in Japan, but going forward, economists expect growth to slow to about 2 percent," Morici said.

This highlights the big under-reported story in Obama's persistently lackluster jobs record: the rapidly declining labor force participation rate.

"In the latest, much celebrated, unemployment report, the labor force participation rate had plummeted to 63.7 percent, the most rapid decline in U.S. history," writes economist Peter Ferrara.

"That means that under President Obama nearly 5 million Americans have fled the workforce in hopeless despair," Ferrara adds.

 The nightly network news made a big deal of the 243,000 new jobs that were created in January, but what they did not report was that 1.2 million discouraged workers had simply dropped out of the workforce, Ferrara reported.

But they were not counted among the unemployed because they had ceased looking for a job and that sent the unemployment rate down.

“They may desperately need and want jobs. They may be in poverty, as many undoubtedly are, with America suffering today more people in poverty than in the entire half century," says Ferrara. "But they are not counted in that 8.3 percent unemployment rate that  Obama and his media cheerleaders were so tirelessly celebrating last week."

Add these discouraged dropouts and Obama's shameful unemployment rate climbs to 11 percent. Still, that is not the true rate of unemployment.

There is more fuzzy math  in the BLS's statistics. Another 2.8 million, BLS said, "wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months,"

But they weren't counted as unemployed because they said they had not looked for a job in the previous four weeks.

All of these workers, discouraged drop-outs and the so-called "underemployed" forced to work part-time or temp jobs, pushes the real jobless unemployment rate to 15.1 percent.

How the BLS arrived at an 8.3 percent unemployment rate is difficult to ascertain considering 16 states, including the most populated, had jobless rates that fell between 12.3 percent and 8 percent in February. Among them: Nevada, 12.3 percent; Rhode Island, 11 percent; California, 10.9 percent; North Carolina, 9.9 percent; Florida, 9.4 percent; Georgia and Illinois, 9.1 percent; New Jersey, 9 percent; Michigan, 8.8 percent; Kentucky, 8.7 percent; and New York, 8.5 percent.

Obama insists we're moving in the right direction, even though unemployment rates remain very high by historical standards. Economists say the unemployment figures are still dreadful.

"The unemployment rate today, 10 quarters after the end of the recession, is still a full two percentage points higher than it was during the peak of the last recession in 2003," Heritage Foundation economist J.D. Foster told Human Events.

In the fourth year of Ronald Reagan's presidency, after a deep recession, unemployment was 7.5 percent. It was a tame 5.8 percent in 2008, the last year of George W. Bush's presidency. Can Obama do any better? So far he hasn't.

Even Obama's supporters in the news media think he has failed miserably on the economic front, especially on jobs.  Liberal New York Times economics columnist Paul Krugman says, "things are not O.K. -- not remotely O.K. This is still a terrible economy."