In a new poll, Gallup asks voters to rank their priorities for the next president. Unsurprisingly, the top answer is “jobs,” followed by “reducing corruption in the federal government,” and “reducing the federal budget deficit.” Here are the full results:

Writing at the Washington Examiner, Byron York cites this as evidence that the Obama campaign is out of step with the public:

I'm beginning to wonder whether Mitt Romney and all of his supporters weren't linguistics majors in college. After all, the thing you choose to study reflects what you think is important. If you major in physics, it's because the laws and operation of the universe are what you find most important. If you major in economics, it's because you find money to be the prime organizing force of human activity. And linguists, like the Republicans of 2012, believe that language is the key to understanding who we are as humans.

Here's what I mean. Let's say you wanted to indict not Barack Obama's handling of the economy but his beliefs about the economy to get at the very essence of who he is. How would you do it? Some of us would say, we can determine who he is by looking at his actions. If he's a committed Marxist undertaking the dismantling of capitalism, surely we could find the evidence in what he has done. Did he nationalize the steel industry? Well, no. He (and George W. Bush) kind of temporarily semi-nationalized the auto industry, but that worked out well for everyone and saved hundreds of thousands of jobs, so let's not talk about that. Did he make it impossible for wealthy "job creators" to prosper? Hard to make that case, since corporate profits and wealth concentration at the top are near all-time highs—there's never been a better time to be a capitalist overlord. How about that tsunami of initiative-crushing regulation? Well, you can throw out some names of laws that involve regulation—Dodd-Frank, the Affordable Care Act—but if you want to make a strong case that Obama hates capitalism, you'd have to talk about what's actually in those laws, and conservatives don't really like doing that, just as they might rail against the tyranny of the EPA but they don't want to talk much about what exactly it is they find so objectionable about making sure our air and water are clean.

So the linguists on the right say: Don't let the actions distract you. The key to understanding Obama is in the words.

President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama sat down with CBS News’ Charlie Rose for an exclusive interview that will air on CBS Sunday Morning. In the interview, Obama was pressed by Rose to describe what he thinks has been the biggest mistake of his presidency. The president replied that he thought he got the policies correct, but his salesmanship was lacking. Specifically, Obama said:

When I think about what we’ve done well and what we haven’t done well. The mistake of my first term—couple of years—was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right. And that’s important. But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times (Via Mediaite).

Mitt Romney is back to accusing President Obama of having no plan for economic growth:

The president’s policies have not gotten America working again. And the president is going to have to stand up and take responsibility for it. I know he’s been planning on going across the country and celebrating what he calls ‘forward.’ Well, forward doesn’t look a lot like forward to the millions and millions of families that are struggling today in this great country. It doesn’t have to be this way. The President doesn’t have a plan, hasn’t proposed any new ideas to get the economy going—just the same old ideas of the past that have failed. [Emphasis added]

The core of Mitt Romney’s attack on President Obama’s immigration policy is process-related. “For two years, this President had huge majorities in the House and Senate—he was free to pursue any policy he pleased. But he did nothing to advance a permanent fix for our broken immigration system,” said the Republican nominee in his speech yesterday to the National Association of Latino Elected Officials.

As expected, Mitt Romney has had a field day with today’s dismal jobs report. In an interview with CNBC, the Republican nominee went to town on President Obama. Here are a few choice quotes:

“The President’s policies and his handling of the economy have been dealt a harsh indictment today.”

“The President is always quick to find someone to blame.” He cites Bush, Congress, ATM machines. “But the truth is, the No. 1 job of the president is to get people back to work.”

“He’s not up to the task. He’s over his head.”

If Barack Obama turns out to be a one-term president, historians may mark the summer of 2011 as the moment his failure became inevitable. At that point, the new right-wing Republican House majority declared the national debt hostage and demanded Obama’s surrender to them on all points of domestic policy. When the debt-ceiling statute required authorization of a new federal borrowing limit, they refused to vote on the measure without massive cuts in federal spending and no increase in federal revenue. The crisis was averted by the appointment of an idiotic congressional “supercommittee” that was supposed to identify future cuts, matched with a set of “automatic” cuts that were to take effect if the “supercommittee” failed to come up with a compromise aimed at reducing federal debt.