New ad continues to hit Obama on unemployment, even after rate drops

As the unemployment rate fell to 7.8 percent last month, a new TV ad by the pro-Mitt Romney super PAC Restore Our Future ignores the statistic and refers to "the new normal" of "over 8 percent unemployment."

"Welcome to the new normal, where over 8 percent unemployment is 'doing fine' and millions of Americans have simply given up," the narrator says, referring to President Obama's remark from earlier this year that the private sector is "doing fine."

"[W]e're told we're going forward, even as we fall further behind. This is the new normal. This is President Obama's economy," the ad says.

The $6.3 million buy is set to run in Florida, Iowa and Virginia. Of those three battleground states, only Florida suffers from unemployment above 8 percent. Virginia and Iowa have unemployment rates below 6 percent.

After the new unemployment numbers were released on Friday, Romney tweaked his message from repeatedly pointing out the "43 straight months" of unemployment above 8 percent to saying that Mr. Obama has led with more months of 8 percent unemployment than any president in 60 years.

"I just read that if you look back 60 years, and you look at all the months we had with unemployment about 8 percent before President Obama, there were 39 months in all 60 years with unemployment above 8 percent. With this president, there've been 43 months under one president alone," Romney saidin Newport News, Va.

The statistic obviously does not include the Great Depression, where unemployment was above 15 percent for nearly the entire 1930s; the recession of the 2000s is widely considered the worst U.S. economic scenario since the Depression.