Under the cover of an intensifying Republican nominating contest, the Obama campaign’s top fund-raisers gathered for their first meeting here last week. To galvanize them, they were shown a presentation of potential rivals, including Sarah Palin, and given access to senior advisers to the president, including the White House chief of staff, William M. Daley.
They pledged to reach a fund-raising goal of $60 million before June 30 as a first installment to create a state-by-state organization. Their goals include reactivating the network of supporters, registering young and Latino voters and fighting restrictive new election laws in battleground states now led by Republicans.
While Mr. Obama will not fully engage in campaign activity until next year, aides said, he is embarking on weekly economic-focused trips throughout the summer. Doing so will allow him to use his bully pulpit to show that he is focused on addressing joblessness, the issue that more than any other could shape his electoral prospects and that Republicans are using to assert that his policies have failed.
He will also continue to be the main draw in a fund-raising campaign that has a goal of taking in at least $750 million by Election Day, which would match his 2008 figure even though he does not face the long primary battle that he did four years ago.
“I’m confident that the things that we can control, we will do a good job on,” said David Axelrod, the president’s senior political strategist, who returned to Chicago to help with the re-election effort.
The campaign is shaping up as a test of whether the much-vaunted organizing abilities of Mr. Obama and his team can offset the headwinds he faces. In battleground states, volunteers are fanning out by the thousands to reach out to neighbors who helped Mr. Obama in his first presidential campaign and persuade them to re-up.
Campaign officials said they know that in some cases, 2008 supporters will have to be coached to overcome what they see as disappointment that Mr. Obama has not achieved as much as they hoped. Several thousand times a week, still-committed volunteers knock on the doors of potential new recruits and neighbors involved four years ago to see if they will join in. The idea is to get face-to-face, neighbor-to-neighbor commitments that will have more staying power than those collected by strangers over the phone.
And in the re-election nerve center here, where a handmade calendar counts down the more than 520 days that remain before the election, campaign officials are sorting through census and polling data as they work to chart a variety of routes to the 270 electoral votes Mr. Obama will need to clinch a second term.
The early focus is on the same collection of states that Mr. Obama carried in 2008, with the exception of Indiana, which advisers believe is out of reach. But among these, strategists are digging deeper into Colorado, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina and Virginia — where new census figures show surging populations of Hispanics and blacks, two groups that supported Mr. Obama in 2008 by wide margins. The campaign sees possibilities for gains, for example, around Charlotte, N.C., which not coincidentally is where Mr. Obama chose to hold his party’s nominating convention next year, a decision that aides said signaled how serious they are about competing in North Carolina.
So far, the regrouping of the campaign is a methodical, nuts-and-bolts operation. It is oriented toward rekindling a grass-roots movement that had been the envy of Republicans in 2008 but has shown severe signs of strain over two years of partisan rancor in Washington and economic struggle across the country.
But for all of the planning, the biggest challenges of the election remain largely out of the organizers’ control, as the bleak jobs report on Friday showed.
So uncertain are the economic indicators that Mr. Obama’s aides say they have not fully settled on an overarching campaign theme for next year.
For now, the president faces a delicate task in arguing that things have improved under his watch when they remain so grim for so many — and that the programs he has put in place are working but need time to show their full benefits. With their hopes dashed at this point of substantial improvement in unemployment anytime soon, aides indicated that the theme was likely to be less “morning in America” and more “don’t change horses in midstream.”
Mr. Axelrod said: “We’re not going to be putting up a ‘Mission Accomplished’ sign. Part of the message is going to be we have to see these things through.”
In an interview at his Chicago consulting offices, Mr. Axelrod repeatedly said “stability” for the middle class would be central.
Advisers said the president was just beginning to plug into the campaign, and even then, sporadically. While the campaign manager here, Jim Messina, briefs him on the organizational effort, aides said Mr. Obama was not focused or very interested in the nitty-gritty details, for now.
“He’s doing his day job,” Mr. Messina said in an interview at his new office overlooking Millennium Park. “When he and I are talking about these things he wants to know, ‘What are we hearing on the ground?’ ”
But at the White House and in Chicago, aides are also keeping a close eye on the Republican field.
The president’s advisers are most closely watching the candidacies of Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty, but they are mindful that the rise of the Tea Party movement makes the course of the race hard to predict and makes it difficult to determine the strength of potential populist candidates like Ms. Palin.
“We’re doing our due diligence in terms of really understanding where this race is at and where people are at,” Mr. Axelrod said. “That’s the most important work we can do right now.”
In several interviews, aides to Mr. Obama said they were impressed with the early campaign tactics of Mr. Romney and Mr. Pawlenty. They said Mr. Romney had been wise to remain out of the fray for as long as possible — giving rivals less time to attack him — and Mr. Pawlenty wise to barnstorm important states, early, to become better known. Mr. Romney’s previous experience as a candidate, they suggested, could help him deal with the problems he faces.
They said they also viewed former Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. of Utah, until a few weeks ago Mr. Obama’s ambassador to China, as a potentially formidable general election candidate if he did not have to modulate his policy stances to navigate the Republican primary.
They said they would be ready to pounce on any candidate who switches positions in the hunt for the nomination as lacking core convictions, indicating that they were particularly keen on doing so against Mr. Romney, who is still facing such accusations from his 2008 campaign.
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