Last week’s devastatingly bad jobs report - especially including the downward revisions for the March and April numbers as well as the downward measurement of first quarter GDP to 1.5% - will now fundamentally alter the remaining five months of the 2012 presidential and congressional elections.
President Obama is now doomed to follow in the footsteps of Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush as failed presidents who get swept out of office primarily because the economy was in a downward spiral when their re-election came about.
Soon – within weeks – Mitt Romney will begin to move ahead of President Obama in some of the public polls.
And, similarly, in state polls in the dozen swing battleground states he will close the already-shrinking gap. The result will be a virtual tie inside the Electoral College before the conventions at the end of August and early September.
But all the momentum now belongs to Romney. The jobs report coupled with the anti-Democrat, anti-union blow-out in Wisconsin has put wind back into the GOP’s sails – and deflated Obama.
There is not one piece of good news for Obama to hang his hat on. He is on the defensive. His own fellow Dems – i.e. Clinton, Booker, Rendell and Governor Patrick – have all defended Romney’s record at Bain and thus stripped Obama of that line of attack.
Team Obama has fired all their anti-Romney bullets in the spring, when fewer voters are paying attention. What are they going to do and say in September and October?
And that pathetic David Axelrod speech in front of the State House in Boston was an example of what a political consultant should not do. He made the Obama campaign the laughing stock of the political world.
So, all in all, this indeed is shaping up to be Mitt Romney’s election to lose.
And Romney has proven to be a mixed bag as a candidate. On the one hand, he is indeed tenacious and tries to keep the focus on the economy and jobs.
But he still is the same candidate who does incredibly stupid things like offering to bet Rick Perry “ten thousand dollars” during a debate last fall and parking some of his money is Swiss and Cayman bank accounts – a head-scratching political disaster in most elections.
These are the types of things that can reinforce the Gordon Gekko image that Team Obama wants to pin on Romney all the way to November.
However, Romney has a lot going for him – mostly the deteriorating economy and the threat from Europe and China of an even bigger world slow-down. Plus, the thought of four more years like the ones we have just had is impossible to fathom.
So, unless he screws it all up, he can and should win in November.
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