Remember those late-summer days when we were looking at pictures of sad brokers and were unsettled at dramatic ups-and-downs of stock market tumult during the debt crisis? Well now Americans are back to worrying about their job security. In Gallup polling's latest heat-check of the issue most important to the public, unemployment tops the bill. And, looking at their chart below, you can see that job loss took a back seat to the "economy in general" for a couple months when everyone was focused on the debt ceiling crisis and reading scary headlines of the U.S. possibly defaulting. Now, as "campaign Obama" once again emerged to deliver a jobs speech, that "increased government attention to unemployment is likely the reason behind the bump in the percentage of Americans citing it as the most important problem," Gallup finds.

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Erik Hayden