That’s what the White House and its spinners are telling us — that the passage of a “historic,” albeit much reviled, health-care bill will be enough to hold back the tsunami of anti-incumbency sentiment and abject disgust which voters are expressing toward the Democrat-controlled House and Senate. The political cost-benefit analysis — are more liberals bolstered or more independents turned off? — will be debated between now and November. But meanwhile, the black cloud of unemployment looms over the Democrats, who, after all, promised to focus their attention on job creation, but never really did.

The Hill reports that unemployment figures may become especially troublesome for some already vulnerable House Democrats:

Local unemployment rates higher than the national 9.7 average are further endangering House Democrats’ re-election chances.

For these Democrats, who hail from struggling states like Florida, Michigan, West Virginia, and Nevada, a 9.7 percent jobless rate that Republicans have called “completely unacceptable” would be a welcome improvement.

Vulnerable freshman Democratic Reps. Suzanne Kosmas and Alan Grayson represent swing districts that include parts of greater Orlando, where the unemployment rate in January 2010 was 12.4 percent.

Kosmas, a major GOP target this fall, represents a district that also contains the metropolitan area of Deltona and Daytona Beach, where 13 percent of the labor force was out of work.

“Where things are particularly bad, Democrats are in particular danger,” said David Wasserman, House editor for the Cook Political Report.

But 162,000 jobs were added last month (with the help of 50,000 temporary Census workers), boast the Democrats. Well, it’s less than meets the eye, as the Heritage Foundation (h/t Mark Hemingway) points out:

While the jobs report does indicate that 162,000 net jobs were created in March, almost 50,000 of those jobs were temporary government Census jobs that do not reflect any real economic progress. In total, the U.S. economy has now lost a total of 3.8 million jobs since President Barack Obama signed his $862 billion stimulus plan. We are 8.1 million jobs short of the 138.6 million he promised the American people. . .

And don’t fall for any White House claims that this belated recovery is due to the stimulus. As the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) admitted last month, its analysis of the stimulus’ job creating record was simply “essentially repeating the same exercise” as the initial projections. In other words, the CBO numbers on the stimulus don’t take any actual new real world data into account. Working with actual data, Veronique de Rugy of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center has found: 1) no statistical correlation between unemployment and how the $862 billion was spent; 2) that Democratic districts received one-and-a-half times as many awards as Republican ones; and 3) an average cost of $286,000 was awarded per job created. $286,000 per job created. That is simply a bad investment.

And if you think that this is only conservative nay saying, consider Robert Reich’s take on why the jobs’ picture is grim:

First, government spending on last year’s giant stimulus is still near its peak, and the Fed continues to hold down interest rates. Without these props, it’s far from clear we’d have any job growth at all.

Second, since the start of the Great Recession, the economy has lost 8.4 million jobs and failed to create another 2.7 million needed just to keep up with population growth. That means we’re more than 11 million in the hole right now. And that hole keeps deepening every month we fail to add at least 150,000 new jobs, again reflecting population growth.

A census-taking job is better than no job, but it’s no substitute for the real thing.

Bottom line: This is no jobs recovery.

So while the debate rages on as to whether ObamaCare is really going to protect incumbent Democrats, what’s certain is that they will be tagged with either ignoring or aggravating (for pushing a tax-and-spend, anti employer agenda) the bleak unemployment situation. The Obami may recite ad nauseam their claim that the stimulus plan saved or created jobs, but few voters believe it, and with good reason. The Democrats will therefore face an angry electorate demanding to know why lawmakers obsessed over something voters despised (ObamaCare) and ignored something they did care deeply about (jobs).

The Democrats’ real challenge, then, may be to fend off the argument from opponents that all that time spent jamming through ObamaCare evidences a serious disconnect with voters and a failure to appreciate their primary concern — restoring the economy and re-igniting job growth. Instead of thinking up ways to promote hiring, the Democrats have spent their time passing a hugely expensive health-care bill and plotting massive tax increases (including the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, which will fall heavily on small businesses) and new regulatory schemes (including cap-and-trade), which will only make employers more nervous about expanding their payrolls. You can see why the Democrats are bracing for yet another “change” election.