Obama's Very Bad Week (And It's Only Tuesday Morning)

It's only Tuesday morning and this week is shaping up to be the tipping point to despair and desperation for the President and his supporters. Obama's campaign is publicly bracing for it and that may be doing more than anything else to drive home just how far off the rails the campaign has gone.

Yesterday morning, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina had a special video message for supporters that simply reeked of flop sweat. This is an actual quote:

We knew this was going to be a tough race. And we knew that, once Mitt Romney locked up the nomination, Republicans would get behind him and this race would be tight just like we always knew it would be.

What did you know, Jim? Tell us, we're not sure yet. Also, Messina is not an actor; you should see him shake his head when he repeats for the third time in two sentences that they knew it would be tough. Guys, this is a scripted message and that's the best they could do? He sounds ridiculous while protesting that the campaign is all going according to plan. Indeed, he claims:

We're following the strategy we've had since day one. And we can't afford to lose focus on that.

Please, Jim, from this Republican and with utmost sincerity, don't change a thing.

Later in the day, Obama advisor David Axelrod held a conference call with reporters in which he exhorts them to stop giving Gov. Romney a free pass. Axelrod is, of course, living in a fantasy world where Romney hasn't been closely scrutinized by the media and the voters. Out here in the real world, Axelrod's pleas for the media bullies reporters to pick on someone other than the President are laughable, pitiable, forgettable, stupid. Only idiots would buy this. Greg Sargent rushed to repeat Axelrod's line at WaPo, as did Steve Benen at MSNBC's Maddow blog.

The icing on the cake is that no reputable reporters seem to have bought Axelrod's argument. They have, however, noticed the scent of desperation on the campaign and that makes for compelling television. ABC World News ran this segment last night (watch the whole thing, it's brilliant):

There are several tried-and-true tropes of television news used here, but my absolute favorite has to be when the camera pans a long line of people standing outside what we are to assume is an unemployment office. My other favorite part of the segment is the observation that Obama's remedy after "reeling from the economic bodyblow of Friday's jobs report" is to fly home to Chicago and take a walk.

While Obama was walking around Chicago this weekend, he wasn't campaigning in Wisconsin, since he doesn't want to associate himself with what looks like a losing campaign to unseat Gov. Walker. But he's not fooling anyone. Remember the nationwide protests that followed Walker's reforms? This recall election was supposed to serve national Democrats as a vocal rejection of conservative governance. Instead, Obama is hiding from it.

It's Tuesday morning. Obama's week is going to get worse from here.

posted by Gabriel Malor at 07:24 AM

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