“We know we are in the midst of an American job crisis,” Senator Clinton intoned earlier this month. Senator Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, pledges on his campaign Web site, “The first thing John Kerry will do is fight his heart out to bring back the three million jobs that have been lost under George W. Bush.”

Yet to hear actual businesses tell the story, the problem these days in America isn’t not enough jobs to go around, but not enough workers. This week’s issue of Time magazine quotes a managing director of Goldman Sachs, Melinda Wolfe, speaking of a “labor shortage.” The Chicago Tribune quotes a former chief technology officer at Motorola Inc., Dennis Roberson, warning of what the newspaper describes as “a looming labor shortage at home.” In three to five years, Mr. Roberson tells the Tribune, “We won’t have enough people to satisfy the demand for tech jobs in the U.S.”

The Washington Times quotes the chief executive of the Associated General Contractors, a construction industry trade group, Stephen Sandherr, as saying that his members can’t find enough workers. “In many cases, no one is there to fill this need,” Mr. Sandherr says. And it’s only going to get worse as the baby boomers start retiring.

It’s true that lack of a job can be a “crisis” from the perspective of even one jobless person who is trying to make ends meet, support a family, or pay the mortgage bill. But America’s jobless rate is now below 6% — low by standards of recent history and by international standards. It wasn’t so long ago that economists were claiming that unemployment rates this low are inflationary. Plenty of pessimists note that the unemployment numbers don’t include those who have given up looking for work. But we also know plenty of people collecting unemployment and theoretically “jobless”who are basically taking paid vacations between stints of temporary but nonetheless lucrative consulting work.

So what accounts for the grim spin Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Kerry are putting on the situation? A cynic might say politics has something to do with it; with liberals in California going so far as to urge people not to buy things in September for fear of boosting economic statistics that will be released in October, it’s clear that at least some on the left want to make things look worse than they really are.

The more charitable explanation is that the Democratic politicians are not being deliberately deceptive, but are honestly out of touch with the reality of what’s going on in the economy. The last private sector job Mrs. Clinton held was more than a decade ago at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock. Mr. Kerry has been drawing a government paycheck at least since his tenure as Michael Dukakis’s lieutenant governor in the early 1980s. Whom do you trust to tell you what’s really going on in the economy, them or those from Goldman, Motorola, and the construction industry?