President Barack Obama seems to have a new excuse for all the things that have gone wrong in his administration: they're all just "bumps in the road." That's the phrase he used to describe an outbreak of violence in the Middle East that cost several American lives. It's also how he described stagnant unemployment earlier this year--and the Romney campaign was quick to register its objections at the time:

Every administration faces "bumps"--positive and negative. But when massive unemployment at home, and the murder of a U.S. ambassador abroad, are just "bumps in the road," it is unclear that there is a road at all.

Obama has provided precious little information about what he would do with another four years. His economic plan, for one, is embarrassingly thin. And the apparent foreign policy of using Obama's personality to win over the Muslim world has failed. 

Increasingly, the way "Forward" looks to be more "bumps" than shovel-ready "road."