Wake the F up, people. Do you really want Romney as President?! Obama won North Carolina by a sliver in 2008 (with a kick-@ss ground game and record turnout). And now Mittens for the first time holds a lead here.

“The presidential race in NC continues to be very close,” Public Policy Polling Director Tom Jensen says. “This month we find Mitt Romney leading Obama 48-46. It’s a small lead but it’s still significant because it’s the first we’ve found Romney leading Barrack Obama in our monthly polling since October.

Romney’s gained seven points on Obama over the past two months alone. Jensen says Romney’s small lead is probably heavily influenced by independent voters. “Romney’s up to 20 percent of the democratic vote after being at 15 percent a few months ago,” he says. “For a republican to win in North Carolina really requires winning over a lot of conservative democrats and that 20 percent of the democratic vote suggests Romney’s doing a little bit better on that front.”

Americans have such a short attention span; yeah, this President didn’t give us all of the hopey-changey goodness he promised on the campaign trail, and I’ve been highly critical of his foot-dragging leadership on several fronts (yes, people, read my back catalog), but really — do people want Romney and his adviser Robert Bork packing the U.S. Supreme Court?

Considering the economic mess/slow recovery, the President has finally decided to cry uncle and declare the obvious — he needs more time, and the Romney alternative would be worse.

In an economic speech on Thursday that could set the tone for months of campaigning, Obama is not likely to unveil new ideas to boost the economy and create new jobs, according to Democrats familiar with the preparations for the address.

Instead, he will make the case that he needs four more years to undo the damage left by George W. Bush, his Republican predecessor in the White House, and argue that a President Romney would bring back the weak financial regulation and budget-busting tax cuts of the Bush years.

Obama already is making this argument to small groups of supporters.

“The last thing we want to do is return to the very policies that got us into this mess,” he said at a fundraiser in Baltimore on Tuesday.

I had flashbacks of horror when they held that portrait unveiling of G.W. Bush and Laura at the White House a couple of weeks ago. All I could think of was how we finally got that man out of office in 2008, and all of the economic damage left in his wake as he took off in the Marine One helicopter to return to a life of ease in Crawford.   I told Kate back in 2008 that anyone elected Prez (Dem or Rep) was going to be so f’d by the Bush economy that they’d be a one-termer. Americans were going to blame whoever was in office for not fixing the mess soon enough. Look at these numbers on MSNBC’s voter confidence index. Looks like it would be nearly impossible to top that Bush ’08 number.

The 2010 teabagger midterms were so pitiful; many state legislatures turned over to the GOP and that’s wreaked havoc in those states. North Carolina’s General Assembly is now run by Republicans for the first time since Reconstruction. And yet the PPP numbers tell the story – that short attention span, quick-fix-it mentality runs deep.

“I don’t think the president, for all of his narrative gifts, which are enormous, has done a very good job up to now of integrating the economic difficulties of recent years into a broader story about the future of the American economy,” said William Galston, a former adviser to Clinton.

Democrats believe that Obama already has laid out plenty of ideas for improving the economy that have been blocked by Republicans in Congress, such as spending to improve the nation’s transportation network and helping local governments avoid further layoffs of teachers and firefighters.

Obama will face a near-certain loss in the November 6 election if he does not shift the campaign’s storyline away from his economic track record, three Democratic strategists wrote in a memo released on Tuesday.

Had the President not squandered his first two years “compromising” with the GOP (that’s laughable), we’d probably be in better shape since the Republicans from day one have set out to ensure failure of this administration. Now he’s losing donors on the left and right (no wonder he’s courting the LGBT base).

The 2008 donors who haven’t returned to President Obama are disproportionately centrists and very liberal Democrats, while regular Democrats have stuck by the president, according to a new analysis of campaign finance data.

The analysis, by Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica, matches and deepens a BuzzFeed finding that roughly 90% of those who gave more than $200 to Obama haven’t returned, a mark of the disillusionment among some of his early supporters and of his ongoing struggle — despite the advantages of organization and incumbency — to keep even with his 2008 fundraising totals.

“The 2008 donors who were most likely to give again in 2012 are those with ideological scores most similar to Obama’s, whereas moderate-to-conservative donors and those on far left are significantly less likely to re-up,” Bonica said.

…Only 11% of these drop off donors have given to another political group or candidate this cycle. This low percentage suggests that Obama’s drop off donors from 2008 aren’t so much switching allegiances as they are removing themselves from the political process.

It’s not only donors dropping out of the process. I believe that this White House has miscalculated the apathy in the mighty middle as well. We saw it here in North Carolina and Amendment One. The energized bases on the left and right showed up at the polls in a record primary, but the votes the anti-Amendment One side was counting on to defeat the discriminatory measure just didn’t feel compelled to vote. Barack Obama and his campaign need to worry about these disillusioned low-info voters who’d rather flip on the latest reality show than go to to the polls. The economy has a huge swath of people demoralized and checking out of the system.