In the wake of tomorrow's highly anticipated monthly jobs report and last night's catastrophic debate loss, more bad news arrived this morning for the Obama Administration. Filings for first-time jobless claims spiked to 367,000, an increase of 4,000 over last week.

Like a dim-witted child, President Obama's given the benefit of every doubt by the corrupt media and is always graded on a curve. This means that, because new jobless claims aren't over 400,000, we're usually told something like this:

Claims aren't making much progress on a week-to-week or even a month-to-month basis, but the numbers aren't rising either. The worst you can say about this leading indicator is that it's stuck in neutral. That's not helpful in the sense that it suggests that the labor market's growth will remain sluggish. At the same time, the fact that claims aren't persistently rising implies that economic growth, slow as it is, will struggle on.

In a country where 23 million people are out of work or under-employed; where unemployment is over 8% for the 44th straight month, middle class incomes are dropping, poverty's increasing, and the GDP has collapsed to 1.3% -- "stuck in neutral" is a catastrophe.

If you're "stuck in neutral" while your house is one fire, that's the very worst position you can be in; and that's the position Obama's failed economy is in.

Year after year after month after month, real people are suffering in this country and are stuck there thanks to Obama's miserably failed policies.

Follow  John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC