Mitt Romney has returned from his overseas trip to resume talking about a four-letter word that has been missing from Barack Obama’s vocabulary: jobs.
The presumptive GOP nominee’s mid-campaign trip abroad hit some bumps in the road but nothing of any consequence that’s going to become an issue in a year that is totally fixated on Mr. Obama’s recession-teetering economy.
While Mr. Romney was gone, the nation’s barely breathing economic growth rate slowed to virtually comatose levels — 1.5 percent in the second quarter with bleaker forecasts for the next three months in the 1 percent range.
Life in Mr. Obama’s economy, now in its fourth year, is going to get worse. The Labor Department’s report this Friday is expected to continue an unbroken string of puny monthly jobs numbers that will keep unemployment rates above 8 percent for the rest of this year and next.
While the nightly network news shows devote their air time to the occasional gaffe or irrelevant stories about the ups and downs of the marathon race, voters are worried about more important things: finding a full-time job, talk of impending layoffs by year’s end and struggling with declining incomes.
This week, Gallup released a revealing survey of which issues concern Americans the most. Incredibly, none of them draw much attention on the nightly news or from Mr. Obama’s campaign.
At the top of the voters’ list of priorities: creating jobs, reducing corruption in the federal government, and four straight years of $1 trillion-plus budget deficits. Make that five years. It was announced this week that Mr. Obama’s budget deficit will be more than $1 trillion in 2013.
What are the issues at the bottom of the voters’ list of that elicited their least support? Global climate change and raising taxes on wealthier Americans, the two issues that the network news shows and Mr. Obama’s campaign spend a lot of time talking about.
But the American people know better and must shake their heads in dismay at the often-nebulous network news menu that is dished up each night — carefully avoiding any issues that might make Mr. Obama look bad.
Tens of millions of Americans are suffering under Mr. Obama’s economy. The Gallup poll proved that in a new nationwide survey Tuesday that delivered another dose of bad news to the White House.
“Americans’ economic confidence declined last week to -29, erasing all improvements from the previous week and matching levels not seen since early January,” Gallup said. “Republicans’ and independents’ confidence is at its lowest levels of 2012.”
The economy is now clearly in a nosedive and all Mr. Romney has to do is convince a majority of Americans — especially in the battleground states — that he knows how to put America on a faster growth track to begin making jobs plentiful again at all income levels.
This means strengthening his campaign — now in a dead heat with Mr. Obama — in several strategic areas that remain weak. Among them:
Mr. Romney’s career accomplishments still remain largely unknown. He needs to run TV ads that tell his story, which is a compelling one that is just right for our times.
He was governor of Massachusetts, a state with a hostile, big-spending Democratic legislature that had driven itself deeply into debt when the dot-com bubble burst. He signed hundreds of vetoes to slow spending, balanced the budget, created a rainy day fund, and left office with a low unemployment rate of 4.7 percent.
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