Yeah, I know I shouldn't reuse a title, but it's so…appropriate…

No economic statistic is watched more closely as a gauge of the economic recovery's staying power - or of President Bush's prospects among voters - than the monthly employment numbers. Yet these numbers are failing to explain what is really happening to the nation's workers.

More people are working than have as yet been recorded in the official job count - the one compiled by Bureau of Labor Statistics that gets all the attention. But the official unemployment rate, in turn, greatly understates the number of people who would like to be working.

In December, for example, the nation's employers added 1,000 new jobs, a small number, but the unemployment rate plunged 0.2 percentage points, according to data released by the bureau on Friday. How could there be only 1,000 new jobs yet 300,000 fewer unemployed people, as the December numbers suggest?

The answer, economists say, is that the labor force has changed, and the official data no longer easily capture these changes, particularly the sharp rise in low-wage employment. The disparities in the numbers are giving politicians unusual leeway to make conflicting claims about the employment picture.

The Democratic presidential candidates, for example, heaped scorn on the Bush administration for the almost nonexistent job creation in December. The president, on the other hand, pointed to the drop in the unemployment rate, to 5.7 percent from 5.9 percent in November, as "a positive sign the economy is getting better." And the chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, N. Gregory Mankiw, said in an interview that the official job count showing 1,000 new jobs in December was not accurate by itself.

"I view all economic statistics as imperfect," he said. "They have to be taken with a grain of salt."

In challenging the reliability of the official count, Mr. Mankiw sought to water down its message, which is that 2.3 million jobs have disappeared since President Bush took office in January 2001.