President Obama concedes the Eurozone is the biggest wild card for him in 2012. 9 numbers Obama will watch in 2012

President Barack Obama has always styled himself a numbers guy, a rational, dispassionate devourer of OMB, IMF and NBA statistics.

Even though Obama hates to be compared with Mr. Spock, two of his top advisers, David Plouffe and Jim Messina, are so metric-minded they are more likely to exchange spreadsheets chocked with arcane data than pleasantries.


Outside the campaign, headline numbers — useful but overly broad — tend to dominate political chatter: presidential approval ratings, a candidate’s cash on hand, the top-line unemployment stats, personal likability ratings, measurements of voter optimism or pessimism.

All are useful, but Obama and his GOP foes are swimming in a sea of other data points that may provide a more telling view of Obama’s political prospects heading into a highly uncertain 2012 reelection campaign.

Italian bond yields. The European debt crisis, a slow-motion catastrophe with no predictable or palatable outcome, has the potential to sideswipe the U.S. economy in 2012, hijack the anemic recovery and sink Obama’s reelection chances.

Obama clearly recognizes this, and privately concedes the Eurozone is the biggest wildcard for him in 2012, even if he can’t do much about it. It must be an agonizing realization: After three years of fighting waves of recession — and the GOP — the administration must now cope with events they can’t really master and players they can’t control in Greece, Spain, France, Germany and Italy — the teetering economy with the biggest “boom” potential.

At the G-8 meeting in Cannes this fall, Obama’s staff was left to observe the machinations over the Greek debt deal from the sidelines (often watching CNN in a room adjacent to the press filing center). Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and the State Department’s international finance chief Mike Froman have implored Europe to move quickly to erect a firewall to protect the world from contagion. European finance officials have reminded them that Lehman Bros. was an American firm, and told them to buzz off.

Instead, the EU has opted for a succession of incremental fixes that have left bond rates, especially Italy’s, within a few basis points of the dreaded 7-percent range that could lead to a cataclysmic default and a spillover crisis in the U.S. economy. That’s why officials in the West Wing now pay nearly as much attention to Eurozone bond spreads as Central Time Zone poll numbers.

The Nov. 2, 2012 federal employment report. Just four days before Election Day, the Labor department will give its intensely watched monthly readout of jobs created or lost.

White House officials — who have been riding an unexpected wave of positive job growth over the past two months, with the national unemployment rate now at a two-year low of 8.6 percent — are fond of saying they don’t read too much into any one report.

Good luck with that next year. Obviously, employment trends (slow growth, economists predict) are impossible to predict and the long-term pattern will be well-established by next November. But a report released that close to the election is likely to be watched especially closely — and any major up-or-down shift could impact the race is tight as everyone thinks it will be.

Tim Kaine’s polling in Virginia. No state is more pivotal for Obama than the Commonwealth, which delivered a stunning seven-point victory for Obama in 2008. It was the last place he stopped at the end of the campaign three years ago, and it’s likely to host the final event of his reelection effort next year.

Kaine, the affable former governor and an Obama-picked Democratic National Committee chairman, is locked in a dead heat against former Sen. George Allen — whose exclusive line of attack is linking Kaine to Obama.

Kaine’s “national partisan role advocating for the likes of not only Obama’s policies but those of [House Democratic leader] Nancy Pelosi,” Allen declared in the first candidate’s debate in the fall.

If that attack works — and there’s no guarantee it will in this evenly divided battleground — look out.

No matter how well Obama does in Virginia, he’s not likely to do better than Kaine. If Mitt Romney is the GOP nominee, there’s likely to be some Romney-Kaine crossover — which should keep the moderate former governor a few points ahead of Obama whatever happens. If Kaine dips, Obama dives.

At the moment, both Democrats are holding their own, despite the huge unpopularity of his health reform in the state. The most recent Quinnipiac Poll approval/disapproval split in Virginia was 47/49 percent, a statistical wash. And Obama beats any of his GOP challengers, besting Romney by about five points — though other polls have shown the Massachusetts governor with the sliver of a lead.

Number of $1 million-plus donors to super PACs. The Obama campaign is having precious little trouble netting big cash for the Chicago operation. But the Democratic-linked super-PACS that are supposed to compete with a Karl Rove-directed GOP independent expenditure operation? That’s another story.

So far, the two groups most closely associated with Obama, have raised about $5 million, a fraction of the $100 million they hope to raise this cycle — in part because they haven’t been able to attract big-money liberals turned off by Obama compromises with the GOP. That’s prompted an intervention of sorts by former Clinton money man Harold Ickes, who will pull together the efforts of five Democratic super PACs — and prevail upon unions and big donors to keep the party competitive with the likes of GOP-friendly American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, which already havespent $20 million bashing Obama and other Democrats.

“I think it’s essential that we level the playing field,” says Steve Elmendorf, a high-profile Democratic donor trying to kick-start the effort. “The people we have to appeal to are the large institutional donors, the unions, and the ideological donors who can write a big check. … We have got to raise hundreds of millions just to compete with Rove.”

Hispanic support in Colorado. Latino voters still make up a relatively small slice of the electorate, but they play an outsized role, thanks to their numbers in a handful of key Western states — Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado.

Most Democrats think Arizona will stay red next year, while New Mexico and Nevada lean blue. But Colorado, which Obama won by a narrow margin in 2008 is a real toss-up — with Obama leading Romney by a statistically insignificant two points in the most recent survey by Democratic pollster PPP. That means the state’s Hispanic vote, 13 percent of all ballots cast in 2008, could be the difference between victory and defeat.

Obama’s generic popularity with Latinos, overall, has cooled. But Obama campaign officials care less about approval numbers than Obama’s performance in head-to-head match-ups with Romney, who has ratcheted up his rhetoric against illegal immigration, turning off many Spanish speakers. If Obama can exceed the 61 percent of the vote he won over John McCain, who had a more moderate position on immigration, they think Obama has a good chance of taking Colorado — and winning Nevada and New Mexico more comfortably.

Approval rating of single female voters. When it comes to slice-and-dice segments of the electorate, none is probably more important than the support of single women — a group Obama needs to offset the loss of independent white men in the Midwest and Upper south. That support is especially critical, Democrats say, in the Denver, Philadelphia and Columbus, Ohio suburbs.

Voter enthusiasm among 18-, 19- and 20 year-olds. Eight million new voters have come of age in the past four years, and attracting them is a core component of the Obama strategy nationwide.

The problem, from Chicago’s perspective, is that this group is a lot less fired up and ready to go than teenagers were last time — in no small part because the youth unemployment rate is somewhere between 20 percent and 25 percent, while college costs continue to far outpace economic growth. That may, in part, explain why two of the White House’s central policy achievements — extension of parents’ health insurance to more twentysomethings and student loan reform — were aimed at the young.

So far, however, college campus activity has lagged behind 2008 levels. Voter enthusiasm among younger voters, while high, isn’t quite up to snuff either, according to Democratic field operatives.

The number of union volunteers manning Obama’s phone banks in Ohio. Labor officials in Ohio say it took too long for the Obama campaign to mobilize behind a ballot measure that sought to roll back the state’s GOP-backed anti-union law. But Obama for America organizers dove in toward the end, SB-5 was struck down by two-thirds of the state’s voters, and Obama’s frayed bonds with labor have been momentarily repaired.

Two critical questions remain, however: Will big unions, occupied with state-by-state labor battles, have enough resources to contribute tens of millions to Democratic super PACs? And, just as important, will the rank and file, under seige at the state level, mobilize in force for a president who hasn’t been as forceful on job creation as they would have liked.

“He needs us in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Florida, Jersey — pretty much everywhere,” said one top national labor official whose union has had a hot-and-cold relationship with the West Wing.

Sales of “Dreams of My Father” and “Audacity of Hope.” Obama’s memoirs rocketed back up bestseller charts in 2008. It’s not likely to happen again (“Dreams is #70,031 on Amazon, “Audacity is ranked #9,480), but a sales bump could signal that some ’08 mojo has returned to a heretofore mechanical ’12 campaign.