In the last day we've heard experts in the political world issuing various sounds of celebration (Obama) and consternation (Romney) over the new jobless numbers and the booming stock market. But the reaction on both sides is probably premature at best. Just as this is no ordinary economic recovery, it's wrong to assess the presidential election odds using the ordinary metrics.

True, the Obama-ites have reason to peek up from their defensive crouch, and the Romney camp has been forced to duck into one. The drop in the unemployment rate to 8.3 percent continues what will be the president's best hope of re-election: an upward trend in hiring that persists until election day and undermines Romney's claim that only he can turn the economy around. We've now had five consecutive monthly declines in the unemployment rate, and if that continues, voters may react more to the forward motion than the absolute numbers, even though the current 8 percent levels are still hard for an incumbent to overcome and the jobless rate is likely to remain higher than it was at Obama's inauguration (7.8 percent) by election day. The Dow's return to levels not seen since May 2008, before the final financial collapse, is also a major milestone back into positive territory for Obama.

But keep in mind: this is still the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. "We have never seen unemployment this high for this long," says Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, who notes that jobless rates have now exceeded 8 percent for a record 35 months, surpassing the early '80s recession mark of 27 months.

As I've previously written, an issue that could be more telling for Obama's future could well be the long-term unemployment rate--workers who have been out of a job for more than six months, in many cases a year or more, and can't find a new one no matter how hard they try. "What's really different in this recession is that we have people who really want to be working and really can't find work," Betsey Stevenson, until recently the Labor Department's chief economist, told me recently.

The labor market simply isn't clearing as readily this time around, in part because of long-term unemployment, in part because of business uncertainty over Europe, regulation, political gridlock and other issues, in part because of other pathological conditions that the nation has rarely, if ever, dealt with before. That's especially true of the underwater housing market that Obama only now seems to be realizing is far worse than he thought. "I'll be honest, the programs we've put forward didn't work at the scale we'd hoped," Obama said this week, and on Saturday he pressed the point home in his weekly radio address, urging Congress to pass a plan he took far too long to develop: using the Federal Housing Administration to guarantee refinanced loans at lower rates for underwater borrowers.

But Obama is still not using the sort of strong-arm tactics he could be employing, critics say, such as forcing Fannie and Freddie to take more action to help mortgage holders (they are in receivership, after all). That would require extraordinary political courage. And in the Bizarro world of Washington, it's somehow OK to ignore the "moral hazard" of spending hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out banks with no questions asked, while the idea of helping the victims of those banks is still deemed a sin that might undermine the beautiful purity of capitalism.

As a result, the mortgage and foreclosure crisis remains a spreading infection that has gone largely untreated. It has prevented a resurgence of demand in a consumer economy that, because of stagnant wages, had become dependent on debt and refinancing for growth until the crash. Both the size of the housing bubble and the implosion that ensued also were unnaturally severe because of the sheer amount of housing and securities fraud that fed the mania. Many banks may still be technically insolvent because of the devalued mortgage-based securities and loans they have on their books. Even so, "from the beginning, all the proposals for relief were too small," whether from the administration or the Congress, says Diane Thompson of the National Consumer Law Center.  "They underestimated the amount of fraud. And I think they overestimated the good will of the bankers."

What the Obama team, and the Congress, failed to estimate well at all was the unusual nature of this economic disaster.

Much will depend on the political success that Obama has pinning a good part of the blame on George W. Bush and the Republican-led Congress, versus the skill with which Romney pins much of it on Obama. And that is why when it comes to this presidential election, the usual numbers don't mean a lot.

Somewhere, Lee Atwater is looking down on his home state in disbelief. This can't be what the father of the modern political attack had in mind: a Republican using the modern version of his diabolical invention against another Republican in South Carolina.

King of Bain: When Mitt Romney Came to Town, the newly-released destroy-the-front-runner vehicle from the super PAC run by rival Newt Gingrich's political operatives, blames Mitt Romney for everything from endlessly high unemployment, to the demise of American manufacturing to the destruction of the modern marriage. Visually, it's a montage of smoke-filled rooms, suitcases filled with cash and glinting corporate headquarters juxtaposed with images of cracked sidewalks in broken small towns and the haggard faces of former factory workers.

Over the top? Sure. A gross violation of Ronald Reagan's 11th commandment to Republicans to speak no ill of fellow Republicans? Hands down it is. Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul condemned the film as full of "blatant falsehoods and fabrications."

But the most important point about Gingrich's movie is that it works. And if it is unleashed full force on South Carolina voters as promised, it has the potential to do serious damage to Romney's lead in the state's Jan. 21 primary. That's how powerful it is.

OYSTER BAY, N.Y. -- In a display case at Sagamore Hill, the historic estate of President Theodore Roosevelt, a polished blue tablet reads, "By the turn of the century, business trusts controlled 65 percent of American wealth and Wall Street dictated the course of the American economy." A century-old editorial cartoon depicts the president firing a gun at a portly man with "The Trusts" scrawled upon the man's ample belly.

In a display case at Sagamore Hill, the historic estate of President Theodore Roosevelt, a polished blue tablet reads, "By the turn of the century, business trusts controlled 65 percent of American wealth and Wall Street dictated the course of the American economy." A century-old editorial cartoon depicts the president firing a gun at a portly man with "The Trusts" scrawled upon the man's ample belly.

My 14-year-old son soaked this in with a laugh during a Thanksgiving weekend visit to the national park. "TR rocked," Tyler said. "Can Obama be the next TR?"

That is a question I've been asking myself since 2008 when I did a series of stories with a colleague of mine at The Associated Press about the presidency and the role of that office in these times of immense change. One of the series' shorter pieces, written in March 2008, suggested that Obama and GOP candidate John McCain had the potential to be "TR 2.0."

"We're living in an era of brutal transition not unlike the turn of the last century, when Teddy Roosevelt and fellow Progressive reformers helped lead an anxious nation from the agriculture era to the industrial age," I wrote at the time.

The transition from an industrial economy to the information age and a global economy is creating problems that TR would recognize: A widening gap between the rich and poor, decreased social mobility and a loss of faith in social institutions, particularly politics. Into that breach stepped Obama, a transitional figure who promised a new breed of  leadership that was bigger than partisanship.

He helped lead the country out of a financial crisis, ordered the assassination of Osama bin Laden and pushed through landmark health care reforms (with echoes of TR's agenda), but Obama's presidency is not nearly as transformational as Roosevelt's. At least not yet.

With voters as anxious and angry as they were at the dawn of the 20th century, it makes sense that Obama would travel to Osawatomie, Kansas, this week to draw a line from TR's presidency to his. On Aug. 31, 1910, Roosevelt delivered his New Nationalism address in Osawatomie, where he argued on behalf of a government powerful enough to regulate the economy and guarantee social justice.

"I stand for the square deal," Roosevelt said. "But when I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service."

Roosevelt called for a broad range of social and political reforms including a national health service, social insurance for the elderly, a minimum wage, an eight-hour workday, workers' compensation for work-related injuries, a federal income tax and the right for women to vote.

He railed against the influence of special interests on politics, calling for strict limits and disclosure of campaign donations and the registration of lobbyists.

Roosevelt lost the 1912 election after he bolted the GOP and created the so-called Bull Moose Party, running second to Democrat Woodrow Wilson. But many of the reforms he laid out in Kansas were adopted by Wilson and Roosevelt's cousin, Franklin Roosevelt.

TR thought and acted boldly. He was bigger than any party, a sturdy bridge to the new century. His policies were right for his troubled times.

The question today is whether Obama and his policies are right for these.

Electoral analysts Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin of the liberal Center for American Progress will publish tomorrow a comprehensive demographic and geographic roadmap to the 2012 presidential campaign that political junkies of all ideological stripes will want to keep close at hand.

In their new paper, The Path to 270, the two correctly lay out, I believe, the critical dynamics that will likely tip the balance in both the Electoral College and popular vote next year. President Obama's biggest headwind, they argue, will be disappointment in his handling of the economy; his biggest tailwind will be ongoing demographic change that continues to bend the electorate in his direction.

After Obama's victory in 2008, I argued that he had assembled a "coalition of the ascendant": that is, he ran best among groups that were themselves growing in society, like minorities, the Millennial generation and college-educated whites, especially women.

Teixeira and Halpin draw on that concept to argue that the unbroken wave of demographic change makes it likely that these groups, which remain the most favorable to Obama, will constitute an even larger share of the vote in 2012 than they did last time. They project that the minority share of the vote will rise from 26 percent in 2008 to 28 percent in 2012, an increase commensurate with the average election to election rise since 1992 (National Journal reached a similar conclusion in its analysis, The Next America). And they project that college-educated whites will increase their share of the vote from 35 percent in 2008 to 36 percent in 2012. (Overlapping with both those trends, they calculate that 16 million more Millennials will be eligible to vote in 2012 than in 2008.) Whites without a college degree, the most solidly Republican component of the electorate, they expect to continue their generation-long decline, from 39 percent of the vote last time to 36 percent in 2012. (In 1992, when Bill Clinton was first elected, those non-college whites alone constituted an absolute majority of the electorate, 53 percent.)

The administration's decision to cater to environmentalists by postponing construction of the Keystone XL pipeline is a clear sign of the dilemma. The president decided to punt on a job stimulus measure in order to placate parts of the coalition that elected him in 2008. Environmental sensitivities took precedence over job creation.