In the latest act of a re-election campaign disguised as official duty, President Barack Obama held a news conference today. In both his opening statement and the majority of questions from reporters, the topic was the dismal US economy and job market and in what amounted to a series of not-so-mini-campaign speeches, he alternately attacked his political opposition and defended his attacks on his political opposition.

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After almost every question, our Campaigner-in-Chief uttered a few meaningless sentences followed by the phrase "so the question is..." and then proceeded to answer that question instead of the one posed. Of course the answer to each of his own questions was some variation of pandering to organized labor (construction workers and teachers), trying to divert responsibility for his own failures to congressional Republicans and/or pushing his latest stimulus - sorry - jobs bill.

Meanwhile a few blocks away, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) asked his own question: "Mr. President, why have you given up on the country and decided to campaign full time instead of doing what the American people sent us all here to do? And that's to find common ground to deal with the big challenges that face our economy and our country."

And from the president's own party, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) announced that he would allow a test vote as early as late Thursday on Mr. Obama's American Jobs Act. Despite the repeated calls from the president to "pass this bill now," it's virtually sure to fail even in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

There has been talk recently that President Obama's re-election strategy would mimic that of President Harry Truman's in 1948 when he successfully ran against a "do-nothing Congress". While yet again pushing for his jobs bill, Mr. Obama made a reference to that bit of history saying, "If Congress does something, then I can't run against a do-nothing Congress."

But the Republican-controlled House of Representatives can hardly be called part of a do-nothing Congress as it has passed roughly a dozen bills as part of their job-creation agenda. Those bills are still languishing in the Democratic-controlled Senate. Between those bills and the all but certain Senate defeat of the American Jobs Act, making good on his implied threat to run against a do-nothing Congress would essentially mean the president attacking congressional Democrats.

Of course there's another major difference between Truman's 1948 and Obama's 2012: In the year before Mr. Truman's victory, the US economy was growing at a sizzling 6.8%, not on the verge of a double-dip recession as it is on Mr. Obama's watch. Evidently that's another piece of reality that our Candidate-in-Chief has decided to ignore.