"It's always the economy, stupid!"

Ezra Klein:

The most important story in the 2012 election is...jobs and GDP growth. And yesterday, the news was bad. GDP growth was 1.8 percent in the first quarter: disappointing under normal circumstances and crushing during a recovery. Weekly jobless claims, meanwhile, hit a three-month high. And high gas prices tend to trick people into thinking inflation, which is actually worryingly low, is out of control, further adding to their concerns.

Now, the quarterly GDP growth data, and the weekly jobs numbers, bounce around. A bad result in either category doesn't mean we won't have a good year. And gas prices are high because of demand from China and other developing nations, but they're also high because of turmoil in the Middle East, so we may see them come down as, hopefully, the chaos in Libya subsides. But all of it means we have even more ground to make up. And that means growing and adding jobs at a rate far faster than anything we've seen for any sustained period of time over the last two years. So far as presidential elections are concerned, it's always the economy, stupid, and right now, the economy isn't looking particularly good...