Of course Margaret Thatcher proved in 1983 that it is possible to get re-elected with high unemployment, but in 1980s Britain voters looked to several other indicators to gauge the underlying health of the economy. Here in America, the jobless total has an iconic status amongst the key numbers, its announcement having an immediate effect on the opinion polls. A bad set of results — possibly as a result of the euro crisis hitting US trade still further — might also push American voters into the GOP camp. Here, Thatcher might provide a better template, since she was elected in 1979 despite "like-ability" scores way below Jim Callaghan's.

In the 16 months after President Obama filed for re-election on April 4, 2011, he attended no fewer than 195 fundraisers, well over twice the number that the previous president fitted into the same time frame when he was in office. Commentators such as the former Bush campaign chief Karl Rove think this might have exhausted Obama; hence the series of unprofessional gaffes he has been making. "We tried our plan and it worked!" the President said of the US economy in Oakland, California. "The private sector is doing fine," he has also said, and, by far the most damaging, "If you've got a business — you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen," as he informed the people of Roanoke, Virginia on July 13. Yet that last statement — a direct attack on the central, entrepreneurial part of the American Dream — was actually written on his teleprompter. A speechwriter thought it up, the chief speechwriter let it through, political director David Axelrod failed to cut it out, and the President actually said it. They can't all have been exhausted from fundraising. It's rare that Rove makes excuses for President Obama, and this one won't wash.

Fortunately for Obama, the mainstream media here truly hate having to run negative stories about him.  Thus NBC only broadcast one segment on the story, despite its gaining huge traction elsewhere, ABC and CBS ignored it altogether, and CNN waited four days before reporting it, and only then because Romney had picked up on it. By total contrast, an absurd non-story about the precise date on which Romney left Bain Capital in 1999 was covered no fewer than 17 times by all the major networks in the same week as Obama's denunciation of job-creators.

The networks have also massively amplified the accusation made by Senator Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, that Romney has paid no taxes at all for years, even though Reid had to admit that he had no evidence beyond rumour and speculation upon which to base the accusation, and Romney completely denies it. When Obama therefore accuses Romney of being "Robin Hood in reverse", i.e. stealing from the poor to give to the rich, and can only cite a left-wing think tank's ideologically-biased "report" in support, the networks give it traction. Even though more than one-third of Americans pay no income tax at all, and the top 20 per cent of earners pay 68 per cent of the taxes, there is still room for a re-election campaign that is based on naked class warfare.