With dismal approval polls, Obama hits the road

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama launches a political counteroffensive this week, weighed down by wilting support among some of his most ardent backers, a stunted economy and a daily bashing from the slew of Republicans campaigning for his job.

"We've still got a long way to go to get to where we need to be. We didn't get into this mess overnight, and it's going to take time to get out of it," the president told the U.S. over the weekend, all but pleading for people to stick with him.

A deeply unsettled political landscape, with voters in a fiercely anti-incumbent mood, is framing the 2012 presidential race 15 months before Americans decide whether to give Obama a second term or hand power to the Republicans.

Obama's will face a skeptical public on the road this week, according to the most recent Gallup poll. His approval rating has dipped below 40 percent for the first time in his presidency, and 54 percent fully disapprove of the job he's doing.

While Obama is on the road, the potential GOP nominees will also be scurrying around the country, almost certainly slamming his performance in office.

So it is not coincidental that Obama's trip is occurring now. It is designed to dilute the buzz emanating from the Midwest after Republicans gathered in Iowa over the weekend for a first test of the party's White House candidates. The state holds the nation's first nominating test in the long road toward choosing Obama's opponent.

"You have just sent a message that Barack Obama will be a one-term president," Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann told elated supporters minutes after winning Saturday's Iowa straw poll, essentially a fundraising event that also tests a candidate's organizational and financial strength. She spent heavily and traveled throughout the state where she was born, casting herself as the evangelical Christian voice of the deeply conservative small-government, low-tax tea party wing of the party.

Like Bachmann and all the other candidates, Texas Gov. Rick Perry ravaged Obama when he announced his entry to the race. Perry said the president was presiding over an "economic disaster," in a declaration that stole some of Bachmann's political thunder and undercut the front-runner status of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who didn't compete in the Iowa test vote. Perry clearly cast a broad shadow across the Republican contest.

Obama, expecting the political shelling he would take, fired pre-emptively in his weekly radio and Internet address to the nation on Saturday. He told listeners that it was the Republicans running for president and serving in Congress who were at work crushing voters' hopes and dreams.

The question for Obama and his backers remains: Will he sustain the counterattack? Of late, he's been seen by even his most staunch supporters as too ready to retreat from critical ground when confronted by intransigent Republicans.

Working in Obama's favor, however, is a Republican Party still struggling to find a presidential candidate who lights a fire with voters.

But Obama's re-election could be in peril for lack of a strong message about what he will do to lift the country out of economic malaise and political deadlock.

Polls show voters hold both parties to blame for the stunted economic recovery, an unseemly political fight over raising the limit on U.S. borrowing, an anemic deal to cut the government deficit, the subsequent and unprecedented downgrade of the country's credit rating, wild stock market gyrations and an unemployment rate stuck above 9 percent.

In the face of that reality, Obama is tacking to put some wind in his re-election sails, apparently convinced that he can gather speed by turning up the attack on Congress.

"You've got a right to be frustrated," the president said in his weekly address. "I am. Because you deserve better. I don't think it's too much for you to expect that the people you send to this town start delivering."

He chastised Republicans for brinksmanship, saying "some in Congress would rather see their opponents lose than see America win."

That's an assessment that has some validity, particularly among the new class of Republicans in the House who have used their outsized legislative power to stymie Obama at every turn since their election last November.

Obama and the other Republican hopefuls now face daily scrutiny as well as they try to avoid the same kind of misstep. That's a nearly impossible task in the long, arduous and expensive path toward the White House.