Team Romney: 'Don't get too worked up about the latest polling'

This one falls into the category of: "If you have to say it ..."

The Romney campaign put out a memo this morning from campaign pollster Neil Newhouse arguing that the political world shouldn't make too much of the post-convention data showing President Barack Obama holding a lead over his GOP challenger. The consensus among strategists and analysts is that Romney trailed going into convention season and trails coming out of it — perhaps by a slightly larger margin.

Not so, Newhouse argues:

The reality of the Obama economy will reassert itself as the ultimate downfall of the Obama Presidency, and Mitt Romney will win this race. In his acceptance speech, President Obama did not offer any solutions for the millions of Americans unemployed or underemployed. But his convention speech was not the only big letdown to voters, as Americans also dealt with yet another dismal jobs report last week. President Obama is the only president in modern American history to stand before the American people asking for re-election with this many Americans struggling to find work. The key numbers in this election are the 43 straight months of 8% or higher unemployment, the 23 million Americans struggling to find work, and the 47 million Americans who are on food stamps. Today, there is no question: Americans are not better off than we were four years ago, and that is why President Obama has struggled in this race. The truth is that some of President Obama’s allies are claiming victory, but others are acknowledging the unsustainable position in which they find themselves. This is evidenced in a recent quote in The New York Times by an Obama Administration official saying, “It’s certainly not what I would call the position we wanted to be in at this point in the race…He’s going to have to make the case that we wouldn’t even be at 8 percent if it weren’t for him.” ... Next, the battlefield has actually expanded, not contracted. Note that Wisconsin is now in play and our campaign is now up with ads in that state, while the latest poll numbers from the Albuquerque Journal in New Mexico show the race closing there. And this tightening is not an anomaly. Consider the traditional Democratic strongholds of New Jersey and Connecticut, won by President Obama in 2008 by margins of 15 points and 22 points, respectively. In both states, Pollster.com’s reporting of the most recent statewide polls puts Obama’s lead at only seven points in each of these states.

Newhouse's full memo is after the jump. There's very little new information in the document, which essentially makes the same case for Romney's viability that the GOP has always made: Americans don't trust Obama on the economy and they won't reelect a president presiding over 8-plus percent unemployment.

If that's true, then the whole election has been a bit of a waste and Romney can just win by default. But we're now less than 60 days from the election and Romney hasn't established a decisive lead in a single swing state, so there's a shrinking number of Republicans outside Boston who are confident that the president has been more or less disqualified from the outset.