“Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad”

In the beginning it was a completely normal press conference, the type Barack Obama has held countless times. A few days ago he spoke about America’s economy and praised the success of corporations. While federal, state and local governments have had to lay off employees, businesses have created 4.3 million jobs over the past 27 months. Then came the sentence that the Democrats will regret for a long time: “The private sector is doing fine.”

Anyone who reads over Obama’s argument (as is protocol in the White House) will not find his appraisal scandalous. The private sector is doing rather well while the public sector is in a slump. However, in view of an 8.2 percent unemployment rate and a faltering U.S. economy, the statement is a gift to the Republicans — similar to how Mitt Romney’s saying, “I’m not concerned about the very poor” was a gift to the Democrats.

Within two hours, the machinery was set in motion, which is quite typical of this media campaign. This case is instructive: conservative leaders like Eric Cantor castigate the president as incompetent and Romney himself, during a campaign event in Iowa, declares: “I think he’s defining what it means to be detached and out of touch with the American people.” Obama’s attempt to clarify the statement four hours after his speech is ignored.

Quickly, #doingfine makes the rounds on Twitter; by the weekend the Romney camp has posted a video on the Internet that juxtaposes reports from a few of the 12.7 million unemployed Americans with Obama’s remark. On the conservative cable channel Fox News, Obama’s statement is played dozens of times (the NGO Media Matters has analyzed the reports) while the issue dominates the Sunday morning talk shows.

Another Romney campaign video (“Jolt”) follows: short TV reports on the bad news from the U.S. labor market are shown along with threatening diagrams with red arrows pointing downward. The message is the same: Obama does not understand the concerns of the American working and middle class.

For Republican Mitt Romney, who has a fortune of about $250 million, the six words from Obama’s mouth are worth a lot because it’s usually the former financial investor who is accused of not being in touch with average Americans. This impression of Romney has been reinforced when he said things like “[My wife] drives a couple of Cadillacs,” but he is convinced that his business experience will convince voters to elect him as the 45th president. The former governor prefers, therefore, to talk about economics, facts and figures.

The fact that the 65-year-old also made a blunder didn’t bother the U.S. media very much. Romney explained that Obama was wrong to want to hire “more firefighters, more policemen and more teachers,” a statement which, considering the mediocre state of the U.S. educational system, didn’t just annoy Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman.

The Obama camp’s subsequent video attacking Romney’s statement achieved little; a fact which fits well into the story of Obama’s miserable June.

The Washington Post argues that in light of the re-election of controversial Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, the measly 69,000 newly created jobs in May and the news that Romney collected more donations in April, Obama suffered a “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week.” If the Supreme Court declares health care reform unconstitutional at the end of June, the whole month could be characterized as “terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad.”

Barack Obama is currently focused less on “hope” and “change,” and more on painting a negative picture of his opponent while portraying the election in November as a fundamental decision about America’s economic future. Like two shadow boxers, both appeared in the most competitive state of Ohio on Thursday and explained their points of view: While the president warned that the economic prescriptions of the Republican resemble those polices of George W. Bush that led to the financial crisis, Romney expressed his desire to cut taxes and to reduce the influence of government on the economy (here is a summary from Politico).

To improve the economic situation of Romney’s campaign, his supporters can now buy a $30 t-shirt online that reads: “We’ll be doing fine again when Mitt’s in office.”

On Thursday, the Mormon’s campaign team released a new video (“Doing Fine”) that in all likelihood enormously annoyed Obama and his advisers. Four times the fateful phrase of the president is heard before the following question is read on the screen: “How can President Obama fix our economy if he doesn’t understand it’s broken?”

The Romney strategists have simply copied an ad from 2008. At that time, after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Republican candidate John McCain stated “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” Shortly thereafter, the Democrats posted a clip on YouTube (“Fundamentals”), which ended with the words: “How can John McCain fix our economy if he doesn’t understand it’s broken?” The outcome of that election is known.