President Barack Obama has always styled himself a numbers guy, a rational, dispassionate devourer of OMB, IMF and NBA statistics.
Even though Obama hates to be compared with Mr. Spock, two of his top advisers, David Plouffe and Jim Messina, are so metric-minded they are more likely to exchange spreadsheets chocked with arcane data than pleasantries.
Continue ReadingOutside the campaign, headline numbers ? useful but overly broad ? tend to dominate political chatter: presidential approval ratings, a candidate?s cash on hand, the top-line unemployment stats, personal likability ratings, measurements of voter optimism or pessimism.
All are useful, but Obama and his GOP foes are swimming in a sea of other data points that may provide a more telling view of Obama?s political prospects heading into a highly uncertain 2012 reelection campaign.
Italian bond yields. The European debt crisis, a slow-motion catastrophe with no predictable or palatable outcome, has the potential to sideswipe the U.S. economy in 2012, hijack the anemic recovery and sink Obama?s reelection chances.
Obama clearly recognizes this, and privately concedes the Eurozone is the biggest wildcard for him in 2012, even if he can?t do much about it. It must be an agonizing realization: After three years of fighting waves of recession ? and the GOP ? the administration must now cope with events they can?t really master and players they can?t control in Greece, Spain, France, Germany and Italy ? the teetering economy with the biggest ?boom? potential.
At the G-8 meeting in Cannes this fall, Obama?s staff was left to observe the machinations over the Greek debt deal from the sidelines (often watching CNN in a room adjacent to the press filing center). Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and the State Department?s international finance chief Mike Froman have implored Europe to move quickly to erect a firewall to protect the world from contagion. European finance officials have reminded them that Lehman Bros. was an American firm, and told them to buzz off.
Instead, the EU has opted for a succession of incremental fixes that have left bond rates, especially Italy?s, within a few basis points of the dreaded 7-percent range that could lead to a cataclysmic default and a spillover crisis in the U.S. economy. That?s why officials in the West Wing now pay nearly as much attention to Eurozone bond spreads as Central Time Zone poll numbers.
The Nov. 2, 2012 federal employment report. Just four days before Election Day, the Labor department will give its intensely watched monthly readout of jobs created or lost.
White House officials ? who have been riding an unexpected wave of positive job growth over the past two months, with the national unemployment rate now at a two-year low of 8.6 percent ? are fond of saying they don?t read too much into any one report.
Good luck with that next year. Obviously, employment trends (slow growth, economists predict) are impossible to predict and the long-term pattern will be well-established by next November. But a report released that close to the election is likely to be watched especially closely ? and any major up-or-down shift could impact the race is tight as everyone thinks it will be.
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