WASHINGTON — Sen. Bob Bennett sees the employment statistics released Friday — 96,000 new jobs and unemployment holding steady at 5.4 percent — as a glass half full.

The Democrats on his Joint Economic Committee, on the other hand, see it mostly empty, calling the report by the Department of Labor evidence the economy has been mishandled by the Bush administration.

"Even taking into account the technical adjustments, President Bush still has the worst jobs record of any president since Herbert Hoover in the Great Depression," said Rep. Pete Starks, D-Calif., ranking Democrat on the committee co-chaired by Bennett.

And Democrats say almost one out of every 10 Americans is unemployed or forced to work part-time jobs because of the soft economy.

But Bennett, R-Utah, who shrugs off the Democrats' criticism as presidential politicking, remained optimistic about the numbers, saying they "confirm the continued improvement of the country's job market" and a trend of 13 straight months of job growth.

He pointed out that 1.8 million new jobs have been created since last August, and unemployment, although still high, is well below the high of 6.3 percent in June of last year and "below the average unemployment rates of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s."

Numbers specific for Utah were not available. But Kelly Matthews, an economist and executive vice president at Wells Fargo Bank in Utah, said he has seen nothing in Utah's economic performance to suggest the state is not outperforming the nation as a whole.

He pointed to almost 30,000 new jobs created in the second quarter of this year, about 10,000 more than had been expected.

"It is much, much stronger than we previously thought," he said. "Utah is surprisingly strong."

But will the second-quarter performance hold up during the third quarter? National employment numbers during that time were rather anemic, averaging 100,000 new jobs a month in that time. That is only about half of what the nation needs to claim it is in an economic environment of expansion and new hiring, Matthews said.

It is possible the national trend of soft employment growth will spill over to Utah. "I don't hear of any areas where companies are experiencing softness," he said. "But it is a clear disappointment nationally."

Kathleen Utgoff, commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, presented the monthly report to Bennett's Senate committee. She pointed out that revised employment numbers for the first three months of 2004 showed 236,000 more jobs than had originally been estimated.

Utgoff also reported that workers saw their paychecks increase by 3 cents an hour on average during September.