You can expect to hear the president's remark widely mocked, but he's mostly correct.
Updated, 1:53 p.m.
In a hastily called press conference Friday morning, Barack Obama seemed reluctant to make news, adopting his most professorial tone. But he managed to do it anyway when he said that "the private sector is doing fine." It was today's quote that launched a thousand tweets; the Romney campaign almost immediately sent out a press release mocking it. Some even compared it to John McCain's disastrous statement that "the fundamentals of the economy are strong," made the same day Lehman Brothers collapsed.
But while it's probably true that the remark will come back to haunt the president, facts ought to matter. Unlike McCain, who was obviously wrong about the economy, Obama isn't totally off base. Here's the rest of his comment:
Where we're seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government, oftentimes cuts initiated by, you know, governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help that they have in the past from the federal government and who don't have the same kind of flexibility of the federal government in dealing with fewer revenues coming in.
The president also noted that corporate profits have hit record highs.