But you don't have to look very hard to see that the baby steps the economy is taking have left workers worse off than they were back in June 2009. Examples:

Labor force participation. The share of people working or actively looking for a job fell nearly two full percentage points during Obama's "recovery." Put another way, the ranks of those who've abandoned the job market have swollen by more than 7 million.

Long-term unemployed. A million more workers have been unemployed 27 weeks or longer than there were at the recession's end. That's hardly the norm for economic recoveries. The Reagan recovery had cut the number of long-term jobless in half by this point.

Median weeks unemployed. Meanwhile, the median length of unemployment is higher today than in June 2009 — 19.8 weeks today compared with 17.2.

New entrants. Joblessness among new entrants to the workforce is 300,000 higher than three years ago.

Unemployment rate. And even though the current unemployment rate of 8.2% is officially below the level three years ago, that's because millions have given up looking for work and so aren't counted as unemployed. If you adjust for that change, today's unemployment rate would be 10.9%.