It’s now a week after a heart-breaking loss to a president who, above all else, knows how to campaign.  And he knows how to divide and, unfortunately, he knows how to quilt.  The president quilted together disparate elements to make enough of a majority to get himself re-elected.

It was the ugliest campaign I ever saw, but it worked.  At what cost?  That has yet to be determined.  Certainly he has degraded the process of running for this highest office.  I’ve seen some vicious mud-slinging for congressional seats, but I’ve never seen a president declare of his opponent, as Obama did, “he’s not one of us.”  And that was one of the nicer accusations he made.

So the president won, though he did it with almost 8 million fewer votes.  He did it by attacking Romney with such dark abandon that he scared moderates away.  Democrats voted in this election.  Republicans voted.  Moderates stayed home.  That was the dark genius of the Obama 2012 campaign, demonize, demonize, demonize and suppress voter turnout.  As Michael Medved has asserted, low voter turnout almost always favors the incumbent.

But President Obama now faces four more years in a job that he didn’t particularly seem to enjoy.  Except for the golf.

Not only that, he is losing his Secretary of State, his Director of Central Intelligence, and many of his most senior advisers.  He faces the fiscal cliff, which is not going to be an easy situation to resolve, and he faces an economy that is in a decided downturn.  When new taxes kick in next year and Obamacare in 2014, he may be facing an economic disaster.

Yes, the president won re-election, but that doesn’t mean he should celebrate.  There’s a lot of work to be done, and I don’t believe he’s up to the task.  We’ll see.

‘The hits just keep on coming,’ as they say.  For Democrats in general and President Obama in particular, however, that’s not good news.

Today the unemployment numbers for April show that only 115,000 jobs were created in that month.  While unemployment fell to 8.1%, it did so because a huge number of Americans stopped looking for jobs.  Instead, we see huge numbers of Americans applying for disability benefits.  You think that’s a coincidence?

But the really bad news for Democrats is Wisconsin.  Embattled Republican Governor Scott Walker’s campaign announced today he raised an impressive $13 million in the past reporting period, mostly from small donors, though he also has a solid base of supporters in the business community.  Right now he has $25 million saved up for the coming recall election and leads in the polls.

Unions are trying desperately to turn back reforms to public union agreements which are weakening their political clout everywhere.  They’ve made Wisconsin the front line in their battle against reform and plan to spend a whopping $40 million to try and unseat Governor Walker.  Unions have the great advantage of being able to bring the funding of a national organization to bear, but their efforts to remove Walker have gained national attention and the governor is being supported by individuals across the country who believe in what he’s doing.

So, how is this bad for the president and for Democrats in Washington?  Because this effort is going to siphon a huge portion of political funding away from national campaigns.  Union coffers are fairly deep, but they’re not bottomless, and if Governor Walker manages to win the election, it will be a demoralizing and draining defeat for the unions.  Democrats desperately need union support, but, one way or another unions are further handicapping Democratic efforts in November.

Let’s say unions do manage to unseat Governor Walker this summer?  The funds going into the effort will not be easily or quickly replaced.  With Democratic control of the senate in jeopardy and the House looking as if it will remain in Republican hands, this effort to win a battle could lose Democrats their war.

And if unions fail in Wisconsin, the loss is magnified in a such a way as it might hurt them far more than victory could ever help them.  The recall election is one month away and a recent poll shows the Governor ahead of both his Democratic rivals.  Many pundits predicted Walker’s defeat, now it seems he may well survive this all-out effort to replace him with a more compliant Democratic governor.

This is the race to watch as it will be a bellwether for elections in November.  I think It’s time for me to donate to the Walker campaign.