A New Washington Post/ABC News poll asked Americans “What is the single most important issue in your choice for president?” The poll found that the economy or jobs dominated the responses with 51 percent. No other issue came close to breaking double digits.

There are now two more polls, in addition to the two polls released last weekend, showing that Newt Gingrich has the lead in the Iowa Caucus. A third poll shows Iowa voters now believe Gingrich is slightly more electable than Mitt Romney.

Really this is your defense, Gingrich? Are people supposed to feel better about your qualifications for president because you can’t remember whether or not a company paid you $1.6 million? That sure makes you seem like a regular man of the people.

Texas Governor Rick Perry’s national poll numbers have plummeted to almost half of what they were only a few weeks ago, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll. Perry is now tied for second with Herman Cain and is well behind front runner Mitt Romney.

There are at least two areas where President Obama and I are in full agreement: his chances in the 2012 election and the current state of regular Americans’ economic lives.

On Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, I was living in Springfield, IL. I had been laid off from my previous employer back at the end of July so my usual routine was to get up, make the coffee, check my email and the various job hunting sites for anything within my skills and career field to apply to, then surf the news sites. That routine stayed pretty much the same, even the week before when I had visited my best friend in Jacksonville, FL for a week, having returned to Springfield on Saturday, September 8.

It was a sunny morning and my then feline companion had joined me at the computer when I saw the first news article about a plane hitting the World Trade Center.

The most recent ABC News/Washington Post poll (PDF) found that 57 % of Americans based, on their own personal experience, don’t think the economy has began to recover. Only 42 % feeling it has began to recover and among that group 81% feel the recovery has been weak.

The fact that so few Americans actually feel the economy has recovered highlights the point Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg has been making about the serious failure of Obama messaging over the past few years

Given that there is still over a year until the election, which is plenty of time for opinions to change, probably the bigger worry for the Obama administration is that this pessimism could become self-fulfilling.

When simply asked whether they wanted Medicare to remain a defined benefits plan or see it changed into a voucher system to buy private insurance, a full 65 percent of Americans said they were opposed to this change, while only 34 percent supported it. After the poll explained that the cost of private insurance would likely rise faster than the value of the vouchers, causing seniors to pay more for insurance (as the CBO says would happen under the House Republican budget), the total opposed jumped to 84 percent.

Every liberal that was momentarily cheered up by Obama’s deficit speech should have known better, known that by ceding so much rhetorical and policy ground to conservatives, his speech was going to produce this result.