President faces flagging poll numbers in an election where the most important factors are likely beyond his control
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Barack Obama tried to make light of the situation. The polls will go up and they will go down, he said. From time to time there will be gaffes and controversies in the political fight for the White House, the president added.
"You may have heard I recently made my own unique contribution to that process," he told a sympathetic audience in Ohio on Thursday to laughter. "It wasn't the first time. It won't be the last."
But for all the president's attempts to downplay the poll numbers that show he is bleeding support in important constituencies and to brush aside the backlash against his claim that the "private sector is doing fine", it's been an unusually bad couple of weeks for Obama. Perhaps not bad enough for the president's campaign team to admit to a serious problem, but the Democratic camp is showing signs of floundering.
The claim about the private sector made the president look out of touch. An increase in unemployment bolstered his opponents' derision of the White House claim that the economy is turning around.
Mitt Romney is showing an increasingly aggressive, confident campaigning style. On Thursday, just before Obama spoke in Cleveland, Romney was at the other end of the state delivering a speech that attacked the White House record on the economy – a message underlined by the launch of a new ad ribbing the "doing fine" remark.
Romney's rise in the polls has the pundits and strategists saying that the numbers are beginning to look worrying for Obama. Even leading Democratic strategists are warning the president that he's got his political message wrong.
The president may be right that the ups and downs of polling and controversies are not of great consequence. Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics who has made a speciality of the impact of economics on presidential elections, said that in the absence of a major scandal the election will be decided on the economy - and the outcome is now largely beyond Obama's control.
Sabato predicts the president will be sunk by the widespread perception that he does not have a vision for recovery and the fact that Romney is proving to be just acceptable enough to swing voters.
"Obama is now dependent almost entirely on luck to win a second term and the luck has to come from Europe. There is nothing left for him to do to stimulate the economy. Even if he could somehow get a big stimulus package passed by Congress, and there's zero chance of that, the effects wouldn't be felt until after the election," he said.
"They have fired all of the bullets they have and they are now stuck in a position where they have to hope that the economic data between now and November are encouraging enough to give him a narrow win for a second term. Having a wonderful campaign team or saying the right thing, it doesn't matter a whit. What matters is whether people feel the economy is getting better."
The Obama campaign says that once swing voters fully understand Romney and the policies he represents - described by the president this week as George Bush's economic strategy "on steroids" - they will pull back from supporting the Republican candidate.
But in the meantime, the voters are moving the other way.
The latest Gallup poll shows that support for Obama has fallen sharply among groups of white voters who gave him some of the strongest support in 2008, and the economy is a big factor. His support is down 9% among white women with a postgraduate education, one of his strongest groups of backers four years ago.
Support has dropped a similar amount among whites with low incomes.
Four years ago, 52% of white voters under 29 years old backed Obama. They played a leading part in getting out the vote. That support has dropped to 43% at present.
Overall, Obama's support has fallen 5% from the last election, according to the poll. That suggests that even if African American votes hold up – and the turnout may not – then he could still lose.
The turnaround in the president's fortunes can be seen in North Carolina – traditionally a Republican stronghold – which Obama won by just 0.3% of the vote in 2008. A year ago, the president was still ahead of a theoretical Republican candidate. But in recent months the tide has swung in Romney's favour in the state.
"The economy in North Carolina is worse than in the nation as a whole," said Michael Munger, a political science professor at North Carolina's Duke university and the Libertarian candidate for state governor in 2008. "And it's going to come down to the economy. Incumbent presidents always win unless they have either an unpopular foreign war or high unemployment rate. At this point, Obama has both. I think he's astonished that his policies or the direction of his leadership has not had an effect on the economy. But it hasn't. The rule of thumb is no president can be reelected with a national unemployment rate above 8%."
Last month, unemployment rose for the first time in nearly a year, to 8.2%, and claims were up again a fraction on Thursday.
This week, three leading Democratic strategists - Stan Greenberg, James Carville, and Erica Seifert - told Obama he's getting the message wrong.
"We will face an impossible economic headwind in November if we do not move to a new narrative, one that contextualizes the recovery but, more importantly, focuses on what we will do to make a better future for the middle class," they wrote in a public memorandum.
The strategists said the president should abandon his assertion that the economy is on the mend because that is not what large numbers of voters feel. Instead they want a "minimal discussion of the recovery and jobs created and maximal empathy for the challenges people face".
"These voters are not convinced that we are headed in the right direction. They are living in a new economy — and there is no conceivable recovery in the year ahead that will change the view of the new state of the country," the memo reads. "They actually have a very realistic view of the long road back and the struggles of the middle class — and the current narrative about progress just misses the opportunity to connect and point forward."
Others have criticised Obama's attacks on Romney's claim to have been a "job creator" at Bain Capital. Bill Clinton said it was a mistake and that the president should stick to drawing out the political and philosophical differences.
"My instinct, you know me, I don't think I should have to say bad things about Governor Romney personally to disagree with him politically," he told CNN.
The White House this week kept up its attempts to remind voters that George Bush is to blame for the economic collapse, pointing out that median family income fell by 40% in the 18 months before Obama took office.
The president derided Romney's economic proposals as a return to the Bush era with trillions of dollars in tax breaks for the wealthy while ordinary Americans endure deep cuts to services and public sector jobs.
"It's like somebody goes to a restaurant, orders a big steak dinner, a martini, all that stuff, then, just as you're sitting down, they leave and accuse you of running up the tab," Obama said in a campaign speech earlier this week.
In tandem, the Democrats are trying to press the message that the president has been frustrated by an obstructionist Republican controlled House of Representatives more interested in bringing down Obama than passing his jobs and stimulus bills. But while a clear majority of voters agree that the recession is Bush's fault, many say Obama has had nearly four years to make an impact.
The president is also trying to draw on the inspiration of his last campaign.
"If people ask you 'What's this campaign about?' You tell them it's still about hope. You tell them it's still about change. You still tell them it's still about ordinary people who believe that in the face of great odds, we can still make a difference in the life of this country. I still believe that," he said.
There's scant evidence that hope and change will be enough this time to mobilise Americans on the scale that played a major part in putting Obama in the White House. Instead, the president's job approval rating is persistently below 50%.
Sabato said that Obama's problem is a growing belief among swing voters that Romney will do better, even if they are not enthusiastic about him.
"Just by accident the Republicans got a nominee who fit the year. Once they nominated Romney, once people learned and are learning that he ran the Olympics, he was a governor, he's a businessman, he's already passed the Oval office test," he said.
"People say: 'He won't blow up the world. He probably won't start an unnecessary war. He probably knows what he's doing economically.' That's all Romney has to do. That's why he's being invisible. He plans to be as controlled as possible, as inaccessible as possible, to cause as little controversy as possible, because he knows if people aren't feeling better by the fall they will simply reject President Obama and he'll be in."
There's another factor at play in North Carolina and some other states.
"We just passed a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, the effect of which was to mobilise the right and to give them a success and demoralise the left," said Munger.
The Republican primaries gave Obama warning that many conservatives are fired up at the prospect of levering him out of the White House. Four years ago they stayed home because John McCain was too much of a compromise candidate.
But the message has gone out on the right that not voting is effectively support for Obama. Some conservative Christian evangelicals, one of the largest blocs of American voters, may have problems with Romney being a Mormon, but during the primaries large numbers of them said they cared more about removing Obama from office. Conservatives want the president out, and they think it is within their grasp.
In contrast, the Obama campaign is struggling to find the same huge energy on the ground that brought him to power four years ago.
"The reason why Obama won North Carolina in 2008 was this astonishing ground game where they had so many volunteers," said Munger. "Without that kind of ground game, Obama's chances were grim anyway, and given the economy I think North Carolina will be red," he said, predicting the state will swing Republican in the next election.
Sabato said that if nothing else comes into play, the Obama camp may decide it has little choice by to make it personal with Romney - hitting not only his record at Bain Capital but his millionaire lifestyle to show he is out of touch with ordinary Americans and indifferent to the plight of the less well off.
"My prediction is it's going to come down to can the Democrats find a way to indict Romney's character and his leadership ability or can the Republicans emphasise the failure on the economy," he said.