Not to mention the first graph would be far more useful if it displayed relative job losses rather than absolute.
The comparison itself seems odd. If the state's private sector loses 1.2M jobs, should the public sector shed a proportional number of employees i.e. teachers, firemen, policemen, prison guards, etc?
It's hard for me to come up with a good reason for that particular choice of graph other than "political spin". One of many reasons I've switched to reading The Economist rather than the Wall Street Journal for economics-meets-politics news, since the Economist makes a more conscientious effort imo to avoid slanting their data or infographics in the direction of their editorial line (and they do take roughly the same free-market editorial line).