If it’s looking bleak for him, it’s looking bright for America! Seriously, cheap shots aside, things are darkening on Obama’s horizon.

Some call what we are experiencing, “The Great Recession,” that’s incorrect. We are in a depression, accurately called, “The Great Obama Depression.”

A bad economy is one thing, but, this depression has hit the swing states, particularly the rust belt harder than the rest of the country. And those are the states Obama must win if he’s to be reelected. The residents of those states have seen quite enough, thank you very much.

But while virtually all states have lost ground since 2008, a National Journal analysis of the census survey found that many of the swing states likely to decide the 2012 election have suffered the heaviest losses. The nine states that switched from voting for George W. Bush in 2004 to Barack Obama in 2008 experienced a greater decline in their median family income than did the nation overall. It’s the same story in the partially overlapping list of 14 states in which Obama attracted between 45 and 55 percent of the vote last time. Both groups, according to separate employment figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, have also lost a higher percentage of their jobs since 2008 than the nation overall.

That’s because the economic crisis did much of its deepest damage in the Rust Belt, which includes many of American politics’ traditional battlegrounds, and in the Sun Belt, which contains many of the newly emerging swing states. This concentration compounds President Obama’s political challenge as he works to assemble a 270-vote Electoral College majority. “It will force him to play defense and put into play states that he didn’t expect to have to defend,” Republican pollster Glen Bolger says.

The president still has some time for the economy to show more signs of life—and a potential case to make even if it doesn’t. Across the country, the pain under Obama’s watch is a continuation of the crisis that began late in George W. Bush’s presidency. But, even so, the census results suggest that in essentially no state could the president feel safe asking voters the question that Ronald Reagan made famous: Are you better off than you were four years ago? Read the rest

Bye, bye Barack! Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out!