I'm a frequent critic of President Obama, but sometimes it's really important to read between the lines. Yesterday the AP posted this story. In it the writer reports that the upcoming 'jobs summit' at the White House isn't about jobs:

President Barack Obama says creating jobs isn't the goal of a coming White House forum on jobs and economic growth.

And the headline reinforces the lede:

Obama: Job creation not goal of Dec. 3 jobs forum

However, a close reading of the story in question would leave the reader confused:

More after the jump.

The president told NBC News on Wednesday that the purpose of the Dec. 3 summit is to figure out how to encourage hiring by businesses still reluctant to do so.

Confused? Well, after taking a look at the transcript of the interview with NBC's Chuck Todd its pretty clear what happened. Todd was looking for a 'gotcha' moment:

Q Right before you left for this trip in Asia, you announced that you were going to convene a jobs summit. This smacks of one of those classic Washington answers to a tough problem: convene a commission, convene a summit. How is this going to create a job?

Obama didn't take the bait. Here's his answer:

Well, that's not the goal. We're doing all kinds of things to make sure that employment is accelerated. Our first job was to make sure that economic growth was happening -- and we're starting to see that now. As I said even when we first passed the stimulus package, job growth tends to lag, it tends to happen after. So what we're seeing now is businesses are starting to invest again, they're starting to be profitable again, but they haven't started hiring again.

He answers Todd's question about the whole 'convening a summit' trope in the negative. And then goes on to very clearly state the jobs are the priority.

And so now a new meme might be floating out there, a la Gore invented the internet, etc. . . that Obama isn't trying to create jobs. Great work AP.