Why Obama should be worried

Politico:

To hear Democrats (and much of the media) tell it, President Barack Obama is a man on the rebound. The president turned in a strong State of the Union speech, picked a smart political fight over taxing the rich and authorized another heroic Navy SEAL mission in terrorist territory. Sounds like a recipe for reelection, they say. 

There is a big problem with this Pollyanna punditry: There are a bunch of real-time numbers coming in that tell a much different tale.

In short, there’s a new Congressional Budget Office report that shows unemployment likely to climb to nearly 9 percent by the election, there’s polling data showing Obama tied or trailing Mitt Romney in the most important swing states (and doing only marginally better against Ron Paul), and there is mounting evidence that the assumption of a decisive Obama fundraising advantage for the fall might be flat wrong. All of this is happening while Republicans are at their worst, withMitt Romney and Newt Gingrich spending millions of dollars and using all of their air time explaining why the other is untrustworthy, deeply flawed and eminently beatable by Obama. 

Let’s look at each:

A new CBO report grabbed lots of headlines for projecting the deficit will top $1 trillion this year — making Obama the first president ever to pile up $1 trillion or more every year in office. That’s not great politics. But it’s not even the worst news contained in the CBO report. The unemployment number is. 

The CBO projects unemployment will rise, hitting 8.8 percent in the third quarter of the year, the heart of the campaign. That’s terrible politics. Obama advisers have told us repeatedly on background that if unemployment is above 8.5 percent in the final months of the campaign, it will be extremely hard, if not impossible, to win. The advisers say independents will not return to Obama if it looks like economic growth is anemic and uncertain and it looks like his policies did little, if anything, to create new jobs under his watch.

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There is much more.

Obama is losing to Romney in the swing states and the latest Gallup data shows him above 50 percent in only 10 states.   I don't think his politics of envy is selling either.  Even if he got his tax increases on the rich they would not pay for his new spending projects, much less reduce the deficit.  To do that he is going to have to address entitlements, which he refuses to do.  In the meantime he is retreating from Afghanistan and weakening the military to continue to try to pay for unsustainable entitlement programs.  I think people will catch on.