Apparently leaving health care reform efforts behind, President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats are turning their attention to jobs and the deficit — issues highlighted both by polls and recent GOP election victories.

The president and top Democrats are fanning out across the country talking about jobs and defending the effectiveness of last year's $800 billion stimulus bill. But it's going to be a difficult sell. Unemployment remains stubbornly high, and most people are not seeing jobs being created in the world they live in, despite White House claims that the widely criticized stimulus bill created, or saved, 2 million jobs.

One year to the day after signing the massive stimulus spending plan, Obama appeared at the White House, accompanied by small business owners who have benefited from the giant stimulus bill. Given today's economic realities, administration officials must have had a difficult time finding those business owners — because most small businesses are not seeing any benefits from the federal spending program. Polls suggest fewer than 10 percent of Americans believe that stimulus spending has created jobs.

Most of the stimulus money, so far at least, has gone to help states plug budget gaps and support funding of public schools and teachers.

Despite the White House plan to send top officials to 35 communities across the country this week to talk up the effectiveness of the federal stimulus bill, the evidence is just not there. Most Americans don't see jobs being created, and that makes the White House sales job — driven by politics — very difficult.

Because of the poor public perception of the effectiveness of the stimulus bill to create jobs, there is minimal support for additional job-creation plans from Washington.

This week, jobless claims are reported to be on the rise again. To be sure, the economy is in better shape than it was a year ago. But job growth clearly is not there.

And, when Obama boasted this week that the economic stimulus program "is one of the main reasons the economy has gone from shrinking by about 6 percent to growing about 6 percent," he was being disingenuous, or at least not telling the whole story. Economists believe that the latest monthly growth figure of 6 percent is a blip that mostly reflects a temporary rebuilding of depleted inventories. Almost nobody would agree with Obama's claim that the economy is on a sustained growth path of 6 percent.

Republicans are correct to question the White House's repeated claims of creating or saving 2 million jobs. There is no way to verify such a figure. And various investigations by journalists last year revealed many mistakes and inflated claims of job creation linked to the stimulus bill. Still, GOP pronouncements that the stimulus bill created no jobs are just as wrong. It's not possible to spend hundreds of billions of dollars without creating

some jobs.The concept of government creating jobs does trouble most Americans. Most people realize that jobs, for the most part, are created by the private sector — business, and especially small business. Jobs require demand, and consumer demand has shown little life in the past year.The president is right when he acknowledges "it doesn't feel like much of a recovery yet." And that reality will make his sales job very difficult.People are skeptical of the massive government spending plan, and the accompanying massive debt, in last year's stimulus bill. They can't see much evidence of the hundreds of billions of dollars already spent, and they remain suspicious that much of the spending was aimed at certain political constituencies aligned with Democrats in Congress.Regardless of what Obama, Vice President Joe Biden or other top officials in Washington say, people are not seeing job growth. And that makes White House claims to the contrary sound like little more than political spin.