Responding to the heavy media coverage of Clint Eastwood’s bizarre rantings at the RNC — a moment that largely eclipsed Mitt Romney’s address — adviser Eric Fehrnstrom and Newt Gingrich both said that Friday’s jobs report could similarly undermine Obama.

“I think the biggest news next week will not be the three nights of the DNC but it will be on Friday…We’re all hoping for good news but the odds are high that the unemployment rate will remain above 8 percent,” Fehrnstorn said on CNN’s State of the Union.

Meanwhile, on Meet the Press, Gingrich was more blunt:

I think the biggest event won’t be his speech Thursday. It’ll be the Friday morning jobs report. If that Friday morning jobs report is bad, it’ll drown his speech. You want to talk about Eastwood? Friday morning jobs report is a lot bigger event next week than Eastwood was this week.

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Republicans have repeatedly blocked Obama’s jobs legislation. In July, the Senate refused to allow a vote on the president’s American Jobs Act, which would have given incentives for companies to “insource” jobs rather than ship them overseas and by most reports would have stimulated GDP growth. As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) reaffirmed in 2010, “Our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term.”

Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol criticized Mitt Romney for ignoring Afghanistan and U.S. troops in his speech to the Republican National Convention last week and today on Fox News Sunday, the influential conservative said he thought Romney could have said more about what he would actually do as president.

Kristol said Romney “did a pretty good job” of criticizing President Obama but said the GOP presidential nominee needed “to actually convince voters by making a positive case” for his candidacy, adding, “there was much less of that”:

CHRIS WALLACE: What did Romney need to do in Tampa and to what degree did he succeed? [...]

KRISTOL: I thought that they should do a more forward looking emphasis on the next four years. They thought they’re comfortable with asking voters to pass judgement on the last four years and Kirsten’s right, just reassuring people about Mitt Romney.

You talk to the top Romney strategists, they use that word an awful lot. We have to reassure voters about Mitt Romney. He doesn’t hate women, he’s a likable guy. He’s a generous guy. The Republican Party is diverse. That’s enough, plus the case against Obama. That’s their theory of the race and they had a convention that fit with their theory of the race. If you believe and I’m more inclined to this other belief, that you need to actually convince voters by making a positive case for the Romney-Ryan ticket, there was much less of that.

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Kristol later returned to his criticism of Romney’s speech ignoring Afghanistan and the troops. “It raises the question of how Mitt Romney would do things differently” in Afghanistan, he said. “Why not at least say a sentence of gratitude for our men and women who have fought over there in Afghanistan and Iraq? I think that was a mistake.”