Somehow, it feels like 1980

The candidates are virtually tied in the polls. But the bottom has pretty much fallen out of the economy, and people are not only dissatisfied with their lives but see them as not having gotten better on the watch of the incumbent president.

That's where we find ourselves today. The main difference between that description and 1980, when what looked like a close race collapsed into an overwhelming victory for the challenger on the last weekend of the campaign, is that at this point in 1980 Jimmy Carter had a nine-point lead on Ronald Reagan. It hadn't gotten close yet.

Things of late have been going Mitt Romney's way. Perhaps an omen of things to come- and certainly an example of the way things are going- is the placement of an Obama ad in the midst of the article to which the previous sentence links:

After a summer with the wind at his back, President Barack Obama is seeing dark clouds forming over his re-election fortunes as bad economic news and political developments cast renewed doubt over his stewardship of the economy. It’s a long way to the November election and the prospects of the contenders will ebb and flow, but, for the moment at least, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney appears to have turned away a barrage of Democratic smear tactics and shifted the campaign focus to the big-picture economic issues that favor him.

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In 1980, Jimmy Carter couldn't even go fishing without his boat being charged by an angry rabbit. In 2012, Barack Obama's people can't even run an ad smearing Mitt Romney without having it appear after a paragraph about how they're running ads smearing Mitt Romney.

Yep. It certainly feels like 1980 to me.

HT: Real Clear Politics