Jobs report: Economy delivers Obama a punch in the gut President Obama, at a NATO 2012 Summit meeting in Chicago on May 20, had bad news with the May jobs report. Kamil Krzaczynski / EPA / June 1, 2012 By David Lauter June 1, 2012, 6:56 a.m. Friday's jobs report -- only 69,000 new jobs created in May and job creation for March and April revised downward -- was close to the worst possible news for President Obama. For the third year in a row, the economy appears to have stalled in the spring after perking up in winter. Voters' views of where the economy is headed are key for both Obama and Mitt Romney, his Republican challenger. The presidential race has been locked in a dead heat for weeks with neither candidate able to break away from the other and most voters firmly committed. The relatively small number of swing voters appears extremely responsive to economic conditions: A person's view of whether the economy will be better or worse next year is one of the strongest predictors of how he or she plans to vote. All that underlines a central reality of the election -- for all the hundreds of millions of dollars they plan to spend, the two candidates remain hostage to economic forces they don't control. For Romney, bad economic news bolsters his central theme that Obama's presidency has failed. By contrast, earlier this year when economic news was mostly good, he had a limited list of fall-back arguments. Obama has sought to deflect blame for poor economic news -- pointing to Republicans in Congress who have blocked measures he has backed to bolster the economy. He's likely to repeat that theme Friday as he campaigns at a factory in the Minneapolis area. Polls also show that Obama benefits from a large number of voters who continue to blame poor economic conditions on his predecessor, George W. Bush. But nearly all voters who share those views already are in Obama's camp, and so far, that has not been enough to break away from Romney. The only other strategy -- one Obama also will now probably intensify -- is to attack his opponent, hoping to make Romney an unacceptable choice to swing voters.