Here’s Politico’s John Harris, during a roundtable on yesterday’s This Week (with “globe-trotter Fancy-Pants” Christiane Amanpour), chiming in on the recent jobs report and, as Amanpour asked, on “what is this going to do for these upcoming elections:”
HARRIS: I think the larger sort of anemic state of the economy almost makes the traditional things that political reporters obsess about — what is the message, what is the campaign strategy, where are they going to put the resources, almost makes them all irrelevant. An unemployment rate nearly 10 percent is the dominant fact. And the fact that there don’t seem to be good policy remedies out there, and the Obama administration does indeed seem at somewhat loose ends as to what its next step is, that just makes it a very, very tough climate, and really makes all the other kind of tactical questions almost irrelevant.
(Which is, in turn, as a glance at Politico’s recent headlines suggests, almost irrelevant to Politico).
Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.