Well, looking at the
bureau of labor statistics you can get a good glimpse of the data (with or without graphs) of historical trends. (the little dinosaur icon links to the historical stats pages for diferent indicators. It will default to 10 years, but you can go all the way back to 1939 if you want. You just have to remember there were fewer people back then, and because of population growth, there needs to be a certain rate of job growth for unemployment to remain steady.
2000 wasn't a spectacular year, and posted net job losses in three different months, the worst of which was June with a loss of 43 thousand jobs. That was the 2nd worst loss of the Clinton adminstration (first was March of 93 - 46 million jobs). Of the seven months Febuary-August of 2001, six of them posted net losses. The only gains were in March - a Respectable though not spectacular 92 thousand jobs. The worst of these was April (-297k), followed by June(-158k) and August(-138k). Of course, after 9/11 things went deep south for several months. Though not a true comparison, April-May-June of 1995 is the closest we can get for under Clinton (the Oklahoma city bombing +163k,-9k, +227k). From late 2003 to present there have been decent, though not spectacular, gains.
one unrelated thing I do wonder - what the heck happened in August of 1983? We went from -308k to +1.114M.
