More bleak job creation news on Friday, and no matter how the White House tries to spin it (“bumps of the road to recovery”??), this is not good news. The nation’s economic recovery is heading backwards, and not even Barack Obama’s biggest apologists can deflect whose policies deserve the blame for this:

We’re heading for disaster on an epic scale, yet the president’s poll numbers have ticked up modestly, and surveys show that he remains personally popular, despite his ruinous policies. Therein lies the Republican challenge for 2012: how to tie the disastrous effects of Obama’s economic program to the man himself and make the electorate understand they’re one and the same.

Because by now it’s impossible for the Democrats to argue that the country’s on the right track or that their economic program hasn’t been given enough time to work. Nothing they publicly promised has come true, and this is before the ship of state hits the looming iceberg of ObamaCare, whose rollback still must be a top GOP priority.

“Leading from behind” — a phrase used by an anonymous Obama adviser in an interview with The New Yorker — is not getting the job done. After two years of unelected czars, increasingly burdensome regulations, executive orders, unread bills rammed through Congress, photo ops, White House parties, international vacations and an endless succession of speeches [Ed. note: and might I add, Sunday golf outings] as the solution to every ill, Americans are hungering for leadership.

The candidate who can best frame the argument as one of national economic survival — and who won’t hesitate to take the fight to the other side — is the one who will be the next president.

And things are even likely bleaker than this. More than halfway through his administration, Obama can no longer lay the blame for this faltering recovery around the neck of his predecessor. It wasn’t George W. Bush who added trillions to the debt in a failed stimulus and failed automaker, bank, and foreign nation bailouts. It isn’t George W. Bush who has created the unprecedented increase in the size and influence of the federal government, and it most certainly isn’t George W. Bush whose adversarial relationship with the private sector, potential investors, the banks, Wall Street, and energy producers has created the worst climate for job creation since the Great Depression. This failing recovery hangs around the neck of Barack Obama like a yoke (or toilet seat, if you prefer).

You can damned well bet that if it were a Republican in the White House the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth from the mainstream dino-media would be at Defcon 1. The bleating would be 24/7 hysterical, and the nightly network news shows and newspapers across the country would be filled with stories of human suffering and depair caused by the “Bush/McCain Depression”. Instead, with the so-called “Chosen One” in the White House, there’s nary a peep.

But I have to believe that even his most ardent supporters have got to be feeling a little concerned and restless about an administration that may (and I say may, because twelve months is a long time in the world of politics) have to run its re-election campaign without an economic recovery to claim as an accomplishment.