Two months left. Now -- after a fever-year of caucusing and nine-nine-nine-ing and moon colonies and talking to chairs -- the presidential campaign is supposed to start getting interesting.
The coming weeks will bring four debates, a new avalanche of attack ads, and massive efforts to turn out voters. As a distracted country begins to tune in, candidates will focus on the sliver of Americans who are political enough to vote but not so partisan that they've already decided.
On Friday, President Obama and Mitt Romney began their sprint, each appearing in multiple states. Both focused on new jobless figures, the latest signal of the dismal economy that has hung over this campaign from the start.
"We know it's not good enough," Obama told an audience in Portsmouth, N.H. "We need to create more jobs, faster."
Defining moment may still be ahead
Even now, after all that Romney and Obama have already said and done, it's likely that many of their campaigns' defining moments are still in the future. At this point in 2008, for instance, Lehman Brothers was still in business. Joe the Plumber was still just Joe, a plumber. And Obama was behind.
This year, Romney is hoping that the next plot twists will favor him. "I know there's a lot of bad news out there, but I'm looking beyond the bad news," Romney said in Orange City, Iowa, trying to project optimism about both the U.S. economy and his own campaign. "I'm looking over the hill and seeing what's going to happen just down the road just a bit. And what's going to happen is America's about to come roaring back."
This is the last lap of a race that has always been close. Obama has a slight lead in two of eight key swing states: Florida and New Hampshire. But the polls show the remaining six -- Virginia, Ohio, Iowa, Colorado, Nevada and Wisconsin -- are anybody's guess.
