Pew Research just released polling data on their People Press website indicating that the general consensus among those polled seems to be that they’re hearing less bad news about the jobs situation, but more bad news about prices:
Certainly, that squares with reality: the price of just about everything is going up and if the overall job market hasn’t gotten much better, it hasn’t gotten the same bad press.
But for Obama, its those prices – specifically oil prices – that he has to worry about for 2012. I would submit that oil prices are a lot more deleterious to Republican incumbent chances than they are to Democratic ones, but prices this bad are just toxic for anyone.