In Close Race, Obama’s Plan B Is Paying Off

Posted by John Cassidy, The New Yorker

With the July 4th holiday upon us, both Presidential campaigns have reasons to be encouraged. After a slew of negative economic news and worrying poll numbers in April and May, Barack Obama has had a good few weeks, and the Supreme Court’s ruling on health-care reform capped it off. Chief Justice John Roberts’s legal two-step cruelly robbed Mitt Romney of the opportunity to portray his rival as a quasi-socialist violator of the Constitution. But the G.O.P. candidate is still in a much stronger position than he was three months ago, when he scraped through the Wisconsin primary and finally brought to an end Rick Santorum’s candidacy.

Both sides have said that the election is going to be close, and there is no reason to doubt it. For now, though, the momentum is running in favor of Obama, who is taking a few days off before embarking a bus tour of Ohio and Pennsylvania. His victory in the high court buoyed the spirits of everyone in Democratic Party, and it wasn’t the only good news that last week brought him. A number of opinion polls taken before the Supreme Court’s decision suggested that his campaign’s Plan B, which was adopted in wake of the economic slowdown earlier this year, is starting to bear fruit.

Plan A was to say that the hard slog of the past four years had been worth it, and that the economy was finally recovering. For an incumbent, this is a pretty standard message: things are getting better—stick with me. Over the winter, when job growth appeared to be perking up, it looked like a winning strategy, but then came the job figures for March, April, and May, which showed the growth in payrolls falling sharply. This Friday, the Labor Department will release the job report for June. Wall Street is expecting the payroll figure to come in at about a hundred thousand. Anything below seventy-five thousand would be another big blow to the White House; anything over a hundred and fifty thousand would be bad news for Romney, whose campaign has gone all in on the notion that the economy needs a new savior.

(More here.)