The White House will be crowing today, according to early reports, that its stimulus has helped create and/or save about 650,000 jobs. Barack Obama's crew will tout this as a sign of success. Maybe others will see this as yet another sign that the Great Recession is supposedly over.

CNN early this morning came flat out and headlined, "Stimulus creates 650,000 jobs."

Wise not to be too hasty about this as a sign that things are getting better for anyone but Wall Street. Go deeper into the subject with the Economic Policy Institute's analysis of the White House's Recovery.gov reports. On the eve of today's release of the 650,000 figure, the EPI said the website's reports from federal contractors are "a substantial step toward federal accountability and transparency" but cautioned that "the estimates of the numbers of job created or retained by individual recipients are deeply flawed in many cases."

This thoughtful debunking is not coming from a right-wing group, either. The EPI is definitely a liberal think tank, though not a knee-jerk defender of the Obama administration.

It's vital for the administration — not for the country but for the White House — to crank up the p.r. about the supposed size of job creation. The question is whether the Obama administration is focusing more on convincing us that the recession is over than on taking firmer steps to actually end the recession.

The press has a short memory, and so do most readers and viewers, and it's premature to proclaim the end of the recession unless unemployment figures are truly dropping. Go back to a shrewd piece in mid-September, "Will Obama, Fed tolerate another jobless recovery?," by McClatchy's Kevin G. Hall, who notes:

Besides, the figures that the White House will trumpet today are, if true, relatively tiny. As Hall points out: