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If the health of the economy determines the next president, then any upbeat economic indicators are to President Obama's advantage.

That's not the way the Republican presidential candidates played the story line, however, when the Labor Department reported Friday that unemployment fell to 8.5 percent in December. In fact, GOP hopefuls applauded the creation of more jobs but said Obama and his policies had little to do with improving trends.

The president greeted last month’s brighter employment picture with a sigh of relief and a lilt of confidence that green shoots may really be ahead in the spring. Any economic improvements throw water on Republicans’ conviction that Obama’s tenure is making the economy worse.

The president has made the Bush economy he was handed the benchmark for how deep the hole has been for the U.S. economy and the worst recession since the Great Depression. Obama opened his comments Friday at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by comparing 2011 to the Bush years, noting that the economy added more private sector jobs than in any year since 2005.

“It is important for the American people to recognize that we’ve now added 3.2 million new private sector jobs over the last 22 months -- nearly 2 million jobs last year alone,” Obama said during an event heralding the arrival of the recess-appointed director of the CFPB, Richard Cordray.

“So after shedding jobs for more than a decade, our manufacturing sector is also adding jobs two years in a row now,” the president continued, “so we’re making progress. We’re moving in the right direction. . . . We’re creating jobs on a consistent basis.”

On the campaign trail Friday, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum assailed Obama’s policies, taking care not to pour cold water on a jobs report that dissected a surprisingly robust gain of 200,000 jobs at the end of 2011.

“It is good news,” Santorum told a reporter for the Wall Street Journal as he entered a Keene, N.H., diner. “I’d like to see that labor force participation go up a lot more, which is continuing to be problematic.”

When asked if the president deserved credit, Santorum responded: “I think our economy is overcoming what Barack Obama is pushing in its place.”