In an interview on “Fox News Sunday” this morning, DNC Chairman and former Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine floated what is sure to become a meme during the election season as the economy continues to be voters’ top priority.

We were in a ditch in January 2009 when President Obama came into office. The economy, worst since the 1930s, two wars, blank check, open-ended, no clear end in sight. In a very tough time the president and members of Congress have done heavy lifting. We’ve had to build the ladder. We’ve had to start climbing out. Our economy is growing again and sometime this year we will have created more jobs in 2010 than during the entire eight years of the Bush administration. So, the choice is this: we were in a ditch, we built a ladder, we’re climbing, we don’t want to put it back into the hands of the folks who put is in the ditch in the first place.

Here’s John Steele Gordon on Kaine’s selective reading of the numbers.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there has been so far in 2010 a net creation of 573,000 jobs. In the Bush years there was a net creation of 1,086,000 jobs. So if there is an average of at least 65,000 net new jobs created per month through December, Governor Kaine’s prediction will be “true” in a strictly mathematical sense.

But there’s a reason Benjamin Disraeli divided mendacity into three categories: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Tim Kaine chooses his base lines dishonestly. Yes, there has been a net of 573,000 jobs created so far in 2010. But in the last 11 months of 2009 — while Obama was president, in other words — there were 3,961,000 jobs lost. So Obama is still in the hole to the tune of 3,388,000 jobs lost on his watch. In other words, Kaine starts the job clock running for Obama only after he had been president for more than 11 months, but George Bush’s job clock started the day he took the oath of office.

Of course, the Obama administration has been blaming George Bush for everything bad that happens on Obama’s watch. But if Obama is not responsible for the job losses in his first 11 months, then, surely, the job losses in the first 11 months of the Bush administration must be Bill Clinton’s fault. Those losses amounted to 1,746,000 jobs.  That would make Bush’s net job creation 2,832,000, still far above what is likely to be achieved in 2010.

All Tim Kaine’s spinning won’t be able to obfuscate the fact that the economy is unlikely to be much improved come election day. I know this is all part of an effort to make a former president an issue 2 years since he ceased to be an issue, but I don’t think the American political center – those who both parties need to appeal to to actually win elections – will be inclined to buy that line.