Barack Obama, Economy | featured news

If high unemployment "was a killer, he'd already be dead," said Republican pollster and consultant Mike McKenna. "The survey data tells you he's not dead." There's a problem with applying historical precedents and conventional wisdom to Obama. He sometimes defies them.

In a sense, what’s really interesting about the Romney and Obama plans is that they don’t conflict with one another. Obama has a set of ideas for boosting job creation now. Romney has a set of ideas for long-term economic growth. You could implement all of Obama’s 41 bullet points and all of Romney’s 59 bullet points simultaneously. There’s nothing about increasing infrastructure investment that keeps you from cutting corporate taxes, for instance.

"[B]usinesses have created 4.4 million new jobs over the past 28 months," the president said, "including 500,000 new manufacturing jobs. That’s a step in the right direction. That’s a step in the right direction. But we can’t be satisfied, because our goal was never to just keep on working to get back where we were back in 2007, and I want to get back to a time when middle-class families and those working to get to the middle class have some basic security. That’s our goal.”

The attack is the latest iteration of President Obama’s attempts to demonize Mitt Romney over his tenure at Bain Capital.

President Obama ripped Mitt Romney today over a report that the Republican's private equity firm invested in companies that moved jobs out of the United States to low-wage countries. "We do not need an outsourcing pioneer in the Oval Office," Obama said during a fundraising speech in Tampa, Fla. "We need a president who will fight for American jobs."

Still, in a measure of Romney's own vulnerabilities, even some voters who say they support Romney believe the president will still be re-elected. Of all adults polled, 56 percent believe Obama will win a second term.

Romney's record, charging him with raising taxes and shipping jobs overseas while he was governor of Massachusetts... CNN reports these new Obama ads will run in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, Colorado and Nevada.

President Barack Obama cast his re-election battle with Mitt Romney as a clash between starkly contrasting philosophies and charged that his Republican rival would hollow out the middle class in a high-stakes speech on Thursday that could set the tone for months of intense campaigning.

Only 38 percent of those up-for-grabs Americans have favorable views of Obama's economic plans, with a majority (54 percent) disapproving. The good news for the embattled president? They aren't much more impressed by Romney's economic ideas -- 47 percent rate his approach unfavorably, with just 35 percent in favor.

Kevin Drum and Ezra Klein make the case that President Obama's insistence on pursuing health care reform in 2009 was not a mistake. Specifically, they claim that there wasn't a real trade-off between the pursuit of reform and helping the economy.