President Obama: ‘$3,000 a year for thingamajig’

Here in Washington DC, some freak tornadoes last night knocked out power and caused an unexpected evening of chaos.

For President Obama, who’s busy fundraising in the Midwest, came an admission that some “serious headwinds” are threatening the economic recovery.

Today he appealed to Republicans in Congress to stop playing politics and pass his proposal to create hundreds of thousands more jobs. “We’ve got responsibilities that are bigger than an election,” he declared.

Except, of course, they won’t pass that bill. Right now, the latest CNN poll puts Obama and his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, more or less neck and neck, with Obama slightly ahead on 49 per cent, and Romney on 46 per cent – within the margin of error.

There’s also a tie on who people think can best fix the economy: 45 per cent apiece. It’s quite a drop in Obama’s standing since April.

Jobs report

And it is definitely not the kind of place that any sitting president would want to be in, just five months short of an election, especially when many experts think most people make up their minds about the state of the economy around six months before they cast their vote.

Friday’s jobs report made dismal reading for the Democrats. Just 69,000 jobs were created last month, well short of the 140,000 needed to maintain a healthy rate of economic growth. The figures sent the Dow Jones average plunging by 275 points.

So even though other indicators, like consumer spending, are fairly strong, there does not appear to be much sign of the kind of groundswell of optimism which might help to persuade Americans that Obama is doing a good job on handling the economy.

Instead, it’s provided a chance for Mitt Romney to trash the president’s record, declaring the figures were a “harsh indictment of the president’s handling of the economy.” Pushing home his message, he went on: “It is now clear to everyone that President Obama’s policies have failed to achieve their goals and that the Obama economy is crushing America’s middle class.”

‘Some thingamajig’

All this matters, of course, because no matter what happens on the other issues occupying the political classes – gay marriage, foreign policy, abortion and birth control – most people will be voting on the bread and butter issues that really matter to them, right here, right now.

Obama first introduced his $447 billion American Jobs Act in September last year, full of bold new infrastructure spending on roads and bridges, plans to create jobs for teachers, police and firefighters, tax breaks for small businesses. Or as Obama put it on Friday, an extra $3,000 a year, which would leave people enough money to buy “some thingamajig”. Just what everyone in the audience was thinking.

“Please excuse Tyler, he was with me.” President Barack Obama

Pass the bill, though, and the figures might start to improve. Except there’s that election pending: why would the GOP want things to look better at this stage in the campaign?

It’s not all bad news for Obama on the economic front, however: the national polls might be balancing on a knife edge, but it’s the battleground states that really matter.

In 6 out of 11 of those crucial swing states, the unemployment figures are slightly better than the national average. And as John Dickerson points out on Slate, a closer look at where the Romney campaign are spending their money shows they’re fighting to keep Republican states, rather than actively trying to win over Democratic votes.

Absence note

And at this stage, at least, voters are still somewhat more enthusiastic about Obama than Romney, whose own supporters still have trouble getting fired up. CNN, commenting on their poll figures, said: “More than six in ten Obama voters say they strongly support the president, while only 47 per cent of Romney voters feel that way about their candidate.” And that’s encouraging for the Demcratic re-election team, in their efforts to keep up the momentum among the grassroots.

“We will come back stronger: there are better days ahead,” Obama urged voters, in an effort to create that much needed hope about the months to come. Rather than a message about ‘are you better off today?’, this was more of a ‘you will be better off tomorrow’.

It might just work, if those economic figures start looking healthier. At least there’s one Obama supporter who went away happy: a young schoolboy whose dad introduced the speech the president gave in Minnesota on Friday, and who skipped school in order to be in the crowd. The president obligingly wrote him the ultimate absence note: ‘Please excuse Tyler, he was with me.’ If only Tyler could reach voting age by November.

This weekend in Washington, the sun is shining again: the tornados have done their damage and moved on. Whether the fallout from the dismal jobs figures are quite as short-lived, remains to be seen.