Recommended: Job One

John Judis, a senior editor at The New Republic, has written an interesting piece entitled Job One: The only way Obama can pull his presidency back from the brink. He argues that despite the furor over health care, and more recently over whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, the real driver for the fortunes of President Obama and the Democratic majority is the economy, and specifically the unemployment rate.

Judis looks at the popularity of Roosevelt and Reagan as they both handled economic difficulties. Here is a fascinating graph from his article that makes the point that disapproval ratings track pretty close to unemployment trends -- when unemployment increases, so does the proportion of the nation disapproving of the president and his party. When unemployment improves, disapproval ratings drop:
It has seemed to me that this administration has had its priorities wrong. Certainly health care reform is important, but repairing the economy is far more important. While all this fuss over health care has been going on, Congress has done little to attack the underlying problems that led to this recession. Banks are still in dire straits, there is still a mass of toxic assets on their books, credit default swaps are still unregulated, the federal deficit is ballooning at an alarming rate, and unemployment continues to rise. Job one (and two and three) should have been to focus on these issues first and leave health care and carbon caps and other issues until this first probelm was truly under control.