A Picture of the Next Election

The following graph, from the Calculated Risk Blog today, summaries quite clearly the main, perhaps the only, factor in the upcoming Presidential election:

It shows the unemployment figures for all the recessions since World War II ended. The red line is the current recession, and the message is simple - years after the start of the recession, jobs still aren't coming back. This will be the dominant issue in the upcoming elections -- not debt, not foreign policy, not even the Middle East wars - but jobs, jobs, jobs.