Steady rain has kept Barack Obama cooped up indoors during his getaway on Martha's Vineyard this week, off the greens and into the books.
"Doing a lot of reading," the President quipped to reporters on his way to dinner Tuesday night.
In addition to author Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, whose suburban liberal characters have grown as weary of their own lives as so many of their real-life versions seem to have become of Mr. Obama, the President has been poring over economic reports abominable enough to ruin any vacation.
From plunging home sales and spiking jobless claims to diving orders for durable goods, mounting evidence that the U.S. economic recovery has stalled is sending Democratic strategists into fits of anxiety, with fewer than 10 weeks left until Americans vote in the Nov. 2 congressional elections.
The White House scrambled to organize a conference call Wednesday between Mr. Obama and his economic policy heavyweights after the U.S. Commerce Department reported that new house sales plummeted in July to their lowest annual rate since 1963.
"The economic team provided an update on the next steps to keep the economy growing, including assistance to small businesses and the extension of tax cuts to the middle class," the White House said in an effort to reassure Americans unnerved by the wave of abysmal economic data.
Still, the bad news keeps coming. On Friday, the government is expected to announce that the U.S. economy grew by a feeble 1.4 per cent in the April-to-June quarter, instead of the 2.4 per cent previously estimated. The economy needs to grow at an annual rate of about 3 per cent to create enough jobs to keep pace with an increasing population. That suggests the current 9.5-per-cent unemployment rate won't be noticeably dropping before election day.
After Tuesday's report of a disastrous July for existing home sales - they posted the biggest one-month drop since 1968 - Republicans have stepped up charges that Mr. Obama's "interventionist" policies have not only failed to fix the battered U.S. economy but are actually making it worse. If the accusations stick, the President's approval rating - hovering at a dangerously low 42 per cent, according to Gallup's daily tracking - could take a further hit.
In mid-August, fully 56 per cent of Americans disapproved of Mr. Obama's handling of the economy, according to an Associated Press poll out last week. A little more than a year ago, the same proportion gave the President the thumbs-up for his economic management.
Republicans have realized that the reversal in presidential fortune has little to do with Mr. Obama's handling of health-care reform, illegal immigration, terrorism, Afghanistan, or the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. As a result, they are framing the Nov. 2 vote almost exclusively as a referendum on the economic management skills of Mr. Obama and his team.
"Virtually no one in the White House has run a small business and created jobs in the private sector. That lack of real-world, hands-on experience shows in the policies coming out of this administration," John Boehner, the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, said in a Tuesday speech designed to establish the GOP themes of the campaign.
"It's time to put grown-ups in charge," he cracked.
Mr. Boehner used the term "job-killing" 13 times to describe the economic policies coming out of the White House and Democratic-controlled Congress, from the original $814-billion (U.S.) stimulus package to recent spending bills to buoy state budgets and prevent teacher layoffs.
Mr. Boehner confided to reporters later that "80 or 90 per cent of this election is going to be about them." That spares Republicans from proposing detailed solutions of their own. It also avoids a divisive internal party debate over ideological purity between the GOP's Tea Party and moderate factions. "Republicans need to run on the Democratic record rather than their own remedies," David Wasserman, House editor at the Cook Political Report in Washington, insisted in an interview. If they do, "it is more likely than not that Republicans will win the House."
Democrats are attempting to pin the blame for the faltering recovery on the continued fallout from Bush-era economic policies. Mr. Obama's stump speech in recent weeks has included a standard reference to Republican road skills and GOP demands to retake the wheel after "almost a decade driving the economy into a ditch."
"You can't have the keys back. You don't know how to drive," the President has repeatedly chimed. "When you want to move forward in your car, what do you do? You put your car in "D." When you want to go backwards, you put it in "R." Keep that in mind in November."
Cute? Definitely. Clever? Maybe. Effective? Not so far.
And it won't be unless Mr. Obama can put some distance between himself and the economic road kill that keeps piling up on his watch.