"I'd rather be us than them"

Ever since the last jobs report, the media has been in a tailspin about President Obama. Yesterday was a perfect example. To them, of course Obama lost the election when he said "The private sector is doing fine." Talk about hysteria!

Meanwhile, Romney was suggesting we don't need cops, firefighters or teachers, dissed the owners of the restaurant in Iowa where he held a town hall discussion, and demonstrated that he doesn't know what a doughnut is. The guy is a walking gaffe.

I think a lot of this comes down to expectations. The media expect President Obama to be smooth, cool and inspirational ALL THE TIME. They're content if Romney gets through the day staying on script. And so folks like Michael Tomasky wind up responding to yesterday by saying dumb sh*t like this:

But be that as it may, the fact is that the Obama campaign is in a hole right now, and until they figure out how to tell a story that makes Romney answer some questions, it’s going to get deeper.

The Obama campaign is in a hole right now? Really? Compared to who? Surely it must be the goddess herself because he certainly isn't in a hole compared to Romney.

Let's take a look at some actual facts about who is currently leading this race. Once again, the best way to judge that is by looking at the electoral map. Right now President Obama has a likely 270 electoral votes. If we look at this from Romney's perspective, his task is to not only run the table on the 5 states where the race is currently tied (Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa and Colorado), but he has to also take one state where Obama is currently leading (the one to watch is Virginia).

If you haven't checked out Nate Silver's place in a while, you might want to go take a look. He's got all of his prediction models up and going for the presidential election. Right now it shows President Obama with a 61.6% chance of being re-elected. Romney's shot at winning stands at 38.4%.

What I really enjoyed about Silver's work is that on his map of "State-by-State Probabilities," he comes up with the very same projection that I did a few weeks ago. It basically boils down to 303 electoral votes for Obama and 235 for Romney.

Soak all that information in and then tell me...who is the one in the hole right now? As David Plouffe said recently:

This is going to be a very close race, but I’d rather be us than them.