President Barack Obama is so fired up about the last stretch of this election that his stump speech is "coming from his loins," top campaign adviser David Axelrod told reporters Friday.

Axelrod made the comment during an impromptu briefing with reporters in Lima, Ohio, along with senior White House adviser David Plouffe. 

Responding to this reporter’s question, "Can you tell us how the president feels right now?" Axelrod responded: "I can say I've known him for 20 years, we’ve worked closely for 10 years; I’ve never seen him more exhilarated than he is right now."

Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP

Senior Campaign Adviser David Axelrod, left, and White House Senior Adviser David Plouffe, talk Friday during a campaign event for President Barack Obama at Springfield High School in Springfield, Ohio.

"You can see in the speech that he’s delivering that this is coming from his loins," he continued. As giggles emanated from the assembled press, he added, jokingly, "I just wanted to say loins."

Despite the light moment, the advisers spent most of the gaggle drilling down into homestretch campaign strategy.

The Obama team was specifically asked about the fact Republican Mitt Romney’s campaign is making a late run for Pennsylvania, evidenced by Romney visiting there Sunday.

Axelrod suggested Romney’s late play for the Keystone state was a result of the Republicans' dwindling hopes in all-important Ohio.

"The fact is their campaign had a car wreck in Ohio and now they’re trying to make up for it in Pennsylvania," he said.

The comment was a clear reference to Romney’s opposition to the auto bailout, which resonates with Ohio voters. But when pressed about why the Obama team would send former President Bill Clinton to Pennsylvania this weekend if they are so confident, Axelrod replied: "All it reflects is our prudence that we’re going to defend what we have."

Plouffe pointed to the fact that there are about a million more Democrats registered in Pennsylvania than Republicans. Still polls show the race is tightening in Pennsylvania with both campaigns pouring money into advertising there – a sign there is at least some unease within the Obama campaign ranks. 

The race is also close in Ohio where Obama spent the day hammering Romney for saying on the stump and in ads that Jeep planned to ship jobs to China. The claim has been widely discredited by the car company and newspapers throughout Ohio. Still, the Romney campaign stands by the claim arguing that the companies will eventually expand production overseas.

When a reporter asked the Obama campaign officials if they saw any tangible sign that Romney’s Jeep ad has hurt him in Ohio, Plouffe responded: "There is no bit of data that we’ve seen in this last week that makes us less confident."

Axelord quipped that reporters will have the answers to all their questions soon: "Everybody is fascinated to know what is going to happen on Tuesday; we're going to know on Tuesday."

Jim Cole / AP

President Barack Obama waves to supporters as he arrives for a campaign event Saturday at Elm Street Middle School in Nashua, N.H.

NASHUA, N.H. –  During a New Hampshire campaign stop Saturday, President Barack Obama focused on Mitt Romney’s record as governor of the state that’s less than an hour south of here, Massachusetts:

"During Governor Romney’s campaign for governor down there, he promised the same thing he's promising now -- said he'd fight for jobs and middle-class families. But once he took office, he pushed through a tax cut that overwhelmingly benefitted 278 of the wealthiest families in the state, and then he raised taxes and fees on middle-class families to the tune of $750 million… Now, when he's asked about this, he says, no these weren’t taxes, these were fees."

The president continued: "There were higher fees for blind people who needed to get a certificate that they were blind. He raised fees to get a birth certificate, which would have been expensive for me."

The campaign hopes that attacking Romney’s Massachusetts record is something that could resonate with the residents of New Hampshire and push their four electoral votes in his direction.

Obama also downplayed Romney’s business record.

"Massachusetts, when he was governor, ranked 48th in small-business creation. And one of the two states that ranked lower was Louisiana that had gotten hit by Hurricane Katrina. So this is a guy who has a track record of saying one thing and doing something else," he said.

Interestingly, that was the only hurricane the president spoke about during his remarks, neglecting to acknowledge Hurricane Sandy, which is bearing down on the East Coast.

However, the White House pointed out that the president is monitoring the situation. He convened a conference call with FEMA and Department of Homeland Security representatives Saturday while aboard Air Force One for a briefing on storm preparations.

After Saturday's event the president was asked by MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough about whether conflicting information about the situation surrounding the Benghazi attack was related to an intelligence community failure.

The president’s response:

"What my attitude on this is is if we find out there was a big breakdown and somebody didn’t do their job, they’ll be held accountable. Ultimately as Commander-in-Chief I am responsible and I don’t shy away from that responsibility."

The entire Morning Joe interview with the president will air on Monday morning on MSNBC.

KISSIMMEE, Fla. -- Kicking off a two-day Sunshine State barnstorm Saturday, President Barack Obama tapped into key parts of what he hopes will be a winning Florida coalition similar to but larger than the one he assembled in 2008.

At stops in Seminole and Kissimmee, Fla., the president, who won the Sunshine State by just 50.9 percent in 2008, targeted the votes of senior citizens, warning that their Medicare benefits would be harmed by a plan put forward by his Republican opponents Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

“I want you to know, AARP, I would never turn Medicare into a voucher,” Obama said at a civic center here, making an explicit play for members of the 50-and-up club. “I believe no American should ever have to spend their golden years at the mercy of insurance companies.”

Obama lost Florida seniors to John McCain in 2008 but is seeking to do better with them this time around, focusing mainly on appealing to their support of federal entitlements. They’re a lucrative demographic in Florida, having made up 22 percent of the total vote in 2008.

Vice President Joe Biden also brought the “Medicare good, Republicans bad” message to Zanesville, Ohio, where he told a crowd there that Romney and Ryan are “not actually preserving Medicare. They’re for a whole new plan, ‘vouchercare.’"

Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP

President Barack Obama, left, on stage after being introduced by Viviana Margarita Janer, right, at a campaign event Saturday at the Kissimmee, Fla., Civic Center.

The Romney campaign pushed back on Biden’s attack on Medicare, saying in a statement that Biden “knowingly and deliberately leveled false and discredited attacks.”

Besides seniors, the president also tailored his pitch Saturday to Hispanic voters, who tended to lean Republican in Florida before 57 percent of them voted for Obama in 2008. Introducing him in Kissimmee was Viviana Margarita Janer, a woman who was born in Puerto Rico but has lived in the United States since she was 6 months old.

Janer urged the audience of 3,000 to register to vote, noting that the website gottaregister.com, which Obama frequently hawks on the stump, is also available in Spanish.

“When you put the ‘I voted’ sticker on, you’re going to feel great pride knowing that you gave this man, this great leader, four more years to finish what he started,” she said. 

And earlier in Seminole, Obama praised Hispanic voters as part of the patchwork that gave him a win in Florida in 2008.

“I look out on this crowd, I am reminded you were the change,” he said to a crowd of 10,000 at the Seminole campus of St. Petersburg College, noting “folks… from every walk of life -- black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, young, old, gay, straight, abled, disabled,” he said. 

The president blazed through friendly territory throughout Saturday, first in Pinellas County, home to Seminole, where he won 54 percent of the vote in 2008. And Osceola County, where Kissimmee is, gave him 60 percent of the vote.

Kissimmee has special resonance for the Obama campaign given Bill Clinton’s post-convention status as Obama has been putting it “Secretary of Explaining Stuff:” Kissimmee was the first place the two campaigned together after Obama bested Clinton’s wife, Hillary, in the 2008 Democratic primaries.

During that Oct. 30 speech, Clinton, perhaps still a bit raw from the bruising primary his wife endured, praised Obama as a good decision-maker in part because he had the good sense to consult the Clintons during the financial crisis.

“He talked to his advisers — he talked to my economic advisers, he called Hillary. He called me,” Clinton said. “You know why? Because he knew it was complicated and before he said anything, he wanted to understand,” Clinton said, four years before he would get a bear hug from the now-president after delivering one of the strongest defenses ever of the latter’s policies.

Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP

President Barack Obama greets supporters Friday during a campaign event at Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, N.H.

President Barack Obama traveled to Portsmouth, N.H., looking to maintain the momentum from his Thursday night Democratic convention address despite a disappointing jobs report released Friday morning.

Trying not to put too much of a damper on the event – his first since his convention prime-time acceptance speech -- the president sought to put a positive light on the jobs report, which showed a lower-than-expected 96,000 jobs created in August and an 8.1 percent unemployment rate.

“Today we learned that after losing around 800,000 jobs a month when I took office, business once again added jobs for the 30th month in a row,” he told the 6,000-person crowd at the Strawbery Banke Museum.

“But that's not good enough,” he continued. “We need to create more jobs faster. We need to fill the hole left by this recession faster.  We need to come out of this crisis stronger than when we went in.”

He spent much of the rest of his speech hitting similar notes as he did Thursday night – explaining in broad, aspirational language his goals for a second term, including adding a million jobs over the next four years; cutting oil imports in half by 2020; improving access to education and overhauling the tax code.

He also, as he did Thursday night, ridiculed Republicans for what he said was a plan that relied solely on tax cuts for the wealthy intended to encourage economic growth among lower-income people.

“All they've got to offer is the same prescriptions that they've had for the last 30 years:  tax cuts, tax cuts, gut some regulations -- oh, and more tax cuts,” he said. “Tax cuts when times are good, tax cuts when times are bad, tax cuts to help you lose a few extra pounds -- (laughter) –  tax cuts to improve your love life -- I -- it'll cure anything, according to them,” he joked.

It was a similar line to one he used Thursday night, when he also characterized Republicans as depending on tax cuts as a cure-all.

“Feel a cold coming on? Take two tax cuts, roll back some regulations and call me in the morning,” he joked at the Time Warner Cable arena in Charlotte, N.C., at the convention.

On the flight from Charlotte to Portsmouth, White House senior adviser David Plouffe downplayed any sort of positive effect the convention would have on the president’s standing in the polls.

“We come out of the convention with momentum. That doesn't mean the race is going to change significantly. But we think that we come out of here with some momentum in terms of putting together the electoral picture,” he told reporters traveling on the president’s plane.

Obama went on to Iowa City, Iowa, where he was to address students at the University of Iowa. He will then travel to St. Petersburg, Fla., where on Saturday he will kick off a two-day bus tour.

BOULDER, Colo. – A mountain range in the near distance behind him, President Barack Obama appeared before thousands of just-returning University of Colorado students here, making a play for the youth vote in this crucial Western state. 

“I could see folks forgetting to vote. They’re having too much fun,” he said, urging the 13,000 students on CU Boulder’s Norlin Quad to go to the polls. “That’s why you are so important because you’re going to have to set an example to the person next to you in class. You’re going to have to remind them, have you voted yet?”

Students at schools like CU Boulder contributed to Obama’s 2008 victory, with 66 percent of young voters picking him over 2008 GOP nominee John McCain. But recent polls show young voters losing excitement at the prospect of voting at all in 2012, let alone showing up for Obama in as large numbers as they did last election.

Underscoring the importance of young voters in this state, the Obama campaign last week launched a “Rocky Mountain Rumble,” challenging sports rivals CU Boulder and Colorado State University to see which school can register more voters by Election Day.

Obama, who campaigned at CSU last week, noted that the school had “a little bit of a head start” and was already up by 41 registrants. “Let’s get it done,” he urged the CU Boulder students.

The president also tailored his standard campaign pitch to voters of all ages in this mountainous frontier state, hearkening back to its pioneer roots: “The story of America is about going forward. Nobody understands that better than folks in the West, because you know, this was a region that was settled by people who understand, ‘We’re not looking back, we’re going forward. We’re going forward to the next frontier, to new horizons,’” he said. 

The Romney campaign released a statement in response to Obama's speech today, alluding to Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, a top Obama surrogate, who on CBS' Sunday morning show Face the Nation responded "no" when asked whether he could "honestly say that people are better off today than they were four years ago

"On the same day that the Obama campaign conceded Americans aren’t better off than they were four years ago, the President offered no solutions to the problems facing our country. Instead of taking us ‘forward,’ President Obama is taking us on a path of declining incomes, high unemployment, and trillion dollar deficits. The Romney-Ryan plan for a stronger middle class will spur economic growth, bring back jobs, and turn our economy around," Romney spokesperson Amanda Henneberg said. 

The Obama campaign is working hard to recapture the nine votes they won in Colorado in 2008 with a 53 to 44 victory over McCain. Of his eleven trips to Colorado since the beginning of his presidency, eight were in 2012, most of which were political.

Boulder County, where Obama spoke today, handed him a resounding 72 percent in 2008. But there were still regions in the state remain deeply red – after all, President Obama was the first Democrat to win Colorado since Bill Clinton did in 1992.

One such area was El Paso County in the southern part of the state, which voted 59 to 40 for McCain. Before his speech today the president sat down for interviews with two TV affiliates from Colorado Springs, the largest city in El Paso County.

Later Sunday, Obama heads to Toledo, Ohio, for a campaign event Monday morning. He’ll then travel to Louisiana where he will tour damage wrought by Hurricane Isaac.

SIOUX CITY, Iowa – President Barack Obama began his "Road to Charlotte" tour Saturday in Iowa, the state that started it all back in 2008.

While this was the formal start of the push to highlight his upcoming speech Thursday at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., the president has been stumping in Iowa pretty regularly this year. Saturday’s visit marked his seventh trip to the Hawkeye state. While Iowa only has six electoral votes, the campaign is determined to prove that the president can once again win over a state that has been politically leaning red since Obama was elected.

In Urbandale, outside of the capital city of Des Moines, the president began to renew his case with his version of a "recap" of this past week's Republican National Convention in Tampa.

"Everything is bad, it’s Obama’s fault and Governor Romney is the only one who knows the secret to creating jobs and growing the economy," the president said sarcastically. "That was the pitch. There was a lot of talk about hard truths and bold choices, but nobody ever actually bothered to tell you what they were."

And then he pledged to give the answers he claimed the Republicans glossed over.

"This Thursday night, I will offer you what I believe is a better path forward, a path that grows this economy, creates more good jobs, strengthens the middle class. And the good news is you get to choose which path we take. We can take their path or we can take the path that I'm going to present."

His speeches in both Urbandale and Sioux City were energetic with new, pointed criticisms of GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis.

Harkening back again to Romney's speech in Tampa, the president reminded the crowd that Romney didn’t mention the troops serving in Afghanistan.

"Governor Romney had nothing to say about Afghanistan last week, let alone offer a plan for the 33,000 troops who will have come home from the war by the end of this month. He said ending the war in Iraq was 'tragic.' I said we’d end that war -- and we did."

Larry Downing / Reuters

President Barack Obama speaks to thousands of supporters Saturday at a campaign event at the Living History Farms in Urbandale, Iowa.

The Obama campaign theme emblazoned on banners at events is "Forward," symbolizing the president's repeated criticisms that Romney's plans will take the country "backwards." But the president newly riffed on this Saturday when he said of the Republican convention, "What they offered over those three days was more often than not an agenda that was better suited for the last century. It was a rerun. We’d seen it before. You might as well have watched it on a black-and-white TV."

But missing from the pair of fiery speeches in Iowa were new ideas from the president. He presented the plans he's been pushing throughout the year. If he has new ideas, he's clearly saving them for Thursday.

Shawna Thomas / NBC News

A sign using the Sioux City, Iowa, airport code Saturday gives President Barack Obama a derogatory greeting on the side of a hangar.

His remarks Saturday were a reworked mash-up that allowed him to choose applause lines that have worked well since he officially took to the trail in May. 

But waiting for the president when he landed was a sign that he still has a ways to go to win over Iowa again, literally. Spread across a hangar at the airport where Air Force One landed was a handmade sign proclaiming "Obama welcome to SUX and We Did Build This" ("welcome to" was in small letters; to be fair, SUX is the airport code for Sioux City, but the sign was meant to be derogatory).

The president continues his tour through Colorado, Ohio, Virginia and Louisiana before heading to Charlotte to give one of the most important speeches of his political career.

Tony Gutierrez / AP

President Barack Obama speaks to troops and military families Friday at the 1st Aviation Support Battalion Hangar at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas.

Fort Bliss, Texas – On the second anniversary of the end of U.S. combat operations in Iraq, President Barack Obama returned to the same Army base he visited in 2010 to announce the mission’s end. The message from the president to the troops Friday:

“When you take off that uniform, we are going to help you fully participate in our economy.  Every single one of you has defended the American dream for the rest of us and every single one of you deserves the chance to live the American dream for yourselves.”

As a part of the aid, the president explained that he signed a new executive order designed to give troops, veterans and military families better access to mental health care.

But while the visit was billed as an “official” White House event, meaning the president wasn’t technically in campaign mode, it was hard not to hear campaign themes and fighting words in the president’s speech. 

Speaking about his 2008 campaign promises to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said, “Ending these wars is letting us do something else: restore American leadership. If you hear anyone trying to say that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, don't you believe it, because here's the truth: our alliances have never been stronger.”

While that felt like a veiled swipe at GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the president’s tough talk toward Congress was not hidden at all. He told the audience of 5000 troops and civilians that “some folks” were trying to scare them when talking about the looming defense cuts that were a result of a congressional deal to raise the debt ceiling last year:

“Understand, nobody wants these cuts … There's no reason those cuts should happen, because folks in Congress ought to come together and agree on a responsible plan that reduces the deficit and keeps our military strong. That's what needs to happen,” the president said forcefully.

The backdrop of men and women in fatigues was all the more prominent Friday in the face of Romney omitting any mention of troops serving in Afghanistan during his nomination acceptance speech Thursday night.

One Obama campaign official said, “In an almost 45-minute speech, Romney didn’t find a moment to mention our troops in Afghanistan or how we’re providing for veterans when they return home.”

The president also vigorously emphasized the promises he believed he has kept during his presidency (pulling all combat troops out of Iraq last year, “taking the fight to al Qaida,” trying to help returning veterans) with a line he repeated three times, “I meant what I said.” 

Obama’s “Road to Charlotte” campaign swing officially begins Saturday with two stops in Iowa followed by visits to Colorado, Ohio and Virginia.  He will also tour Hurricane Isaac damage in Louisiana on Monday afternoon.

GLENN ALLEN, VA -- In a soaking wet blue shirt, President Barack Obama delivered almost his entire stump speech Saturday to an enthusiastic audience that had waited through a downpour to see him speak in a town outside of Richmond.

The president apologized early in the speech for messing up the hairdos of women in the audience.

“We’re going to have to treat everybody for a little salon, hair visit after this,” he joked as the rain fell.

What he didn’t apologize for was continuing to attack Republican candidate Mitt Romney on the subject of his tenure at Bain Capital and its involvement with companies that may have encouraged outsourcing.

“Mr. Romney’s got a different idea. He invested in companies that have been called pioneers in outsourcing. I don’t want a pioneer in outsourcing. I want some insourcing,” the president said to cheers. 

Jason Reed / Reuters

President Barack Obama delivers his speech Saturday during a downpour at a campaign rally in Glen Allen, Va.

On Saturday the Obama campaign released an ad titled “Firms”  that will air in nine swing states. The ad superimposes newspaper article quotes such as this one from the Los Angeles Times: “In business, Mitt Romney’s firms shipped jobs to Mexico and China” over audio of Romney singing “America the Beautiful.”

The Romney campaign and the candidate himself have repeatedly pushed back at the Obama campaign’s claims that Romney deserves blame for any jobs that were moved overseas as the result of actions of the private equity firm he used to run.   

Romney spokesperson Ryan Williams said in response to the president’s speech, “Americans are tired of the same old broken promises and dishonest attacks. They want a leader like Mitt Romney who keeps his word and is more focused on fixing the economy than telling stories."

PhotoBlog: Stumping in the rain

And really, the president’s statement and the new advertisement are just more rocks thrown in the back and forth between the two presidential campaigns over Mr. Romney’s business background.

Jason Reed / Reuters

President Barack Obama greets rain-soaked supporters Saturday during a campaign rally in Glen Allen, Va.

During an interview with NBC News Friday, Mr. Romney said the president needs to “rein in” his campaign and talk about “real issues.”  And in an interview with ABC News, Romney said, “He [Obama] sure as heck ought to say that he's sorry for the kinds of attacks that are coming from his team.” An Obama campaign staffer earlier said that if Romney knowingly misrepresented his position at Bain Capital on Securities and Exchange Commission filings, that might be a “felony.”

Obama spokesperson Jen Psaki’s response to the request for an apology: “Mitt Romney is the same candidate who just a few months ago was questioning whether the President understood America, understood freedom, and spent a lot of time -- and a lot of time on his campaign still to date -- attacking him.”

In other words, don’t hold your breath on that apology-thing, Mitt Romney.

Obama finishes his two-day tour of Virginia with an event in the northern part of the state in  a town called Clinton. Friday while rallying supporters in Virginia Beach, the president alluded to the mathematical importance of the state to get to 270 electoral votes. "If and when we get Virginia. We will win this election,” he said.

As First Read pointed out Friday:

Virginia -- with its 13 electoral votes -- is so important for Obama: A win there, plus in Colorado, enables him to surpass 270 electoral votes without winning Florida, Iowa, Ohio, and Nevada. But a loss there forces the president to MUST win either: 1) Florida; 2) Ohio; or 3) both of Iowa and Nevada to get to 270. And that’s assuming, of course, that Obama holds on to all the states John Kerry won in ’04. 

The president has also been using this series of campaign speeches to highlight the need to extend the Bush-era tax cuts that are supposed to sunset at the end of the year for those who make $250,000 or less as well as call for an end to that tax cut for those who make over that amount of money.

“The Republicans disagree with me on this. Mr. Romney disagrees with me on this. And my attitude is, well, that's fine, but let’s not hold middle-class folks hostage. The top 2 percent, those tax cuts, that will be settled in the next election,” the president said Friday.

Next week the president is expected to travel to Ohio and Texas for more campaign events.

PITTSBURGH — President Barack Obama's first general election bus tour, which started Thursday in Maumee, Ohio, and ended in Pittsburgh on Friday, included 11 colorful stops at places that ranged from a diner to a farmer’s market to a college campus.

He met business owners and high-fived at least one kid with spiky blue hair.

Obama delivered five speeches aimed at selling a message of a slowly but surely improving economy that’s been helped by a recovering auto industry in the country’s Rust Belt. However, the announcement that last month’s unemployment rate remained at 8.2 percent had the president trying to reconcile a tour about economic growth with numbers that point to almost the opposite.

His response to the jobs numbers during a speech in Poland, Ohio, was brief and measured: “It’s still tough out there.”  He continued, “We learned this morning that our businesses created 84,000 new jobs last month. And that overall means that businesses have created 4.4 million new jobs over the past 28 months, including 500,000 new manufacturing jobs. That's a step in the right direction.”

Former Gov. Mitt Romney’s campaign took just the “right direction” part of the president’s comments and responded with a sarcastically emailed “Seriously?”

Romney’s spokesperson also wrote, “It requires adding about 130-150k jobs a month to simply keep up with population growth; only 80k jobs is LOSING [sic] ground.”

But the idea that the country is gradually getting better was the president’s essential message at all of the events along the bus route and really of the campaign as a whole.

In Parma, Ohio, Thursday night the president said, “What we wanted to do was make sure that we started moving in the right direction, moving forward, not moving backwards. And we've been able to do that. We've been moving forwards.  And frankly, we've been moving forwards without a lot of help from the other side.”

He playfully continued, “We've been kind of yanking them. They've been on our ankles and pulling us back, but we've been moving forward.”

 And it’s stories like the one he told in Poland, Ohio, of a woman who had successfully retrained at a community college for a new job, that he hoped people would pass on.

“I met a woman yesterday in Parma who I had met a year earlier. She had been out of work for two years and had gone back to community college at the age of 55 and retrained. And I saw her in the rope line after my speech. She had just been certified and was starting her new job on Tuesday,” the president said somewhat proudly.

Friday morning, before the dismal jobs numbers were announced, the president was still trying to keep his message intact by making a stop at a diner in Akron, Ohio, to have breakfast with three people who were employed at the local Goodyear plant. Creating a picture that could help highlight that the auto industry employs one in eight people in Ohio and that the state’s unemployment rate, 7.3 percent, is demonstrably less than the national average.

But not only was the president pre-empted at his first stop in Ohio by a banner plane flying overhead with a Romney2012 sign, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and former Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota rolled into three of the towns on the president’s schedule to portray Obama as someone who had broken promises.

In an interview after one such event in Pittsburgh, Jindal said of the president, “He promised us four years ago he'd turn around the economy in four years, that didn't happen. Unemployment has been above 8 percent for the last 40 straight months. … We just want folks to know the president has made a lot of promises to the middle class, he's broken a lot of promises.”

And while the Obama campaign counters that by saying there’s been over 28 straight months of private industry job growth, there are other figures that will continue to make the president’s re-election message hard to sell:

• African American unemployment ticked up to 14.4 percent in June from 13.6 percent in May.
• Hispanic unemployment remained higher than the national average at 11 percent last month.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics frames the anemic job growth this way:

“In the second quarter, employment growth averaged 75,000 per month, compared with an average monthly gain of 226,000 for the first quarter of the year. Slower job growth in the second quarter occurred in most major industries.”

Also consider this, according to economic expert Peter Morici, “The economy would have to add about 13 million jobs over the next three years — about 360,000 each month — to bring unemployment down to 6 percent.”

It’s numbers like those that the president is really running against when he boards a bus in a swing state.