I was preparing myself this morning for a terrible jobs report from the U.S. Department of Labor.

It didn’t arrive. What we got instead was a tally of 148,000 jobs created in September, with unemployment falling to 7.2 percent, the lowest it’s been since November 2008.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/22/news/economy/september-jobs-report/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

Are those figures great? No. Are they dismal? No.

I don’t quite know how to describe them. The political hounds on either side will spin it in their direction. Democrats will say the fight over whether to shut down the government hampered hiring. Republicans will say the shutdown didn’t have that much of an effect. Democrats will say 148,000 jobs added means more Americans are working than the previous month. Republicans will say the economy is still too sluggish to be described as being in “recovery” mode.

Hanging over all this is that 16-day shutdown, which delayed the release of the government figures. Maybe we need to wait for the October jobs report to determine what impact the shutdown had, if any.

I’m getting the sense that the mood in Washington is casting a pall over everything these days. Americans are angry at Congress and the White House. Although polling — the scientific kind, not those instant media polls that tell us nothing — tells us Republicans are taking the major body blows as a result of the shutdown and the debt ceiling “crisis.”

That’s the bad news. You want worse news?

The 2014 midterm elections are just around the corner. Get ready for even more politicization.