‘Top Line’: Is Obama peaking too early?

The Ticket

President Obama has had a very good week. The election, however, is not until November.

A January jobs report showed 243,000 new jobs were created, as the unemployment rate ticked down to 8.3%.

A new ABC News/Washington Post poll showed, for the very first time of the cycle, President Obama crossing the all important 50% threshold in a hypothetical matchup with Mitt Romney.

And after Rick Santorum's three-state sweep on Tuesday night, the Republican nomination race seems poised to extend itself in a way that keeps President Obama out of the direct line of fire and ultimately produces a wounded Mitt Romney as the nominee.

To be sure, the week has not been a flawless one for Team Obama as the controversy surrounding contraception coverage and the Catholic Church, as well as the president's decision to embrace and help infuse cash into a friendly Super PAC, have generated some negative headlines.

But the good economic news and the boost in his poll numbers have delivered Mr. Obama one of his best political weeks of the last year. The biggest challenge now for the White House and the president's reelection campaign team in Chicago is to maintain this upward trend over the course of the next nine months. That's no easy feat.

Check out the latest installment of the Yahoo/ABC "Power Players" series where ABC Political Director Amy Walter, ABC Senior Washington Editor Rick Klein, and I hash through all of it on "Top Line."


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