Interesting, considering that many on the left now want to insist that Barack Obama never actually promised that unemployment would remain below 8% thanks to the stimulus legislation. One supposedly non-partisan fact-checking website even covered for Obama by ignoring quote after quote in order to attack George Will for bringing up the promise.

And now here’s Representative Barney Frank (D-MA) to remind Democrats that, um, yeah…you kind of did promise that unemployment would be kept under 8% thanks to the $787 billion “stimulus” legislation. And that was a stupid promise to make.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, called into question the wisdom of projections issued by the Obama administration during the congressional fight over the stimulus bill that argued it would prevent higher levels of joblessness.

“President Obama, whom I greatly admire … when the economic recovery bill — we’re supposed to call it the ‘recovery bill,’ not the ‘stimulus’ bill; that’s what the focus groups tell us — he predicted or his aides predicted at the time that if it passed, unemployment would get under 8 percent,” Frank said Tuesday evening during an appearance on the Fox Business Network. “That was a dumb thing to do.”

The administration famously released a chart during the fight over its signature $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) showing that, if that package were enacted, unemployment would not exceed 8 percent. The projection, authored by Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) Chairwoman Christina Romer, argued that without the stimulus, unemployment would reach a high of 9 percent in the third quarter of 2010.

So to be clear, the administration warned that unemployment would reach 9% if we didn’t pass a $787 billion pet project appropriation stimulus bill. And this spending monstrosity was supposed to keep unemployment below 8%. The current national unemployment rate? 9.5%.