By Arun Kumar

Washington, June 5 (IANS) US President Barack Obama seemed to be cruising along on the road to renewing his lease on the White House in 2012 before a bump came in the way with a poor economic report card.

The economy was slowly but steadily recovering, the elusive mastermind of the traumatic 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, had been killed in a US raid and, above all, no credible Republican alternative appeared to be on the horizon. But then came the dampener.

A grim Labour Department report Friday showed that only 54,000 jobs had been added in May after an increase of about 220,000 jobs in each of the three previous months. The slower gain in jobs edged up the unemployment rate from 9.0 percent in April to 9.1 percent in May.

In the midst of a raging battle to raise America's debt limit, the poor report card on the economic front was indeed bad news for Obama.

As Obama himself acknowledged to an auto factory workers in Toledo, Ohio:

"Even though the economy is growing, even though it's created more than two million jobs over the past 15 months, we still face some tough times."

"You know it's just like if you had a bad illness, if you got hit by a truck, it's going to take a while for you to mend. And that's what's happened to our economy. It's taking a while to mend," he said.

But noting Obama's failure "to curb the nation's nine percent unemployment rate", Politico, a Washington news site focussing on presidential and congressional politics, felt the president will have to reinvent his campaign strategy for the 2012 election.

"He is in a corner, there is no question about it," Politico quoted Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former adviser to then president Bill Clinton as saying. "He is in a political corner, a fiscal corner and an economic corner."

While the economy might not be the sole factor in deciding Obama's political fate, it will set the overall frame of the campaign, the Washington Post said citing a Democratic pollster, Guy Molyneux.

"If things get worse, it would take a great campaign or a terrible failure by his opponent for Obama to win," Molyneux suggested, as noted by the Post. "And if this ends up being just a hiccup and we see strong growth next year, then a Republican victory starts to look pretty unlikely."

A recent CNN poll found that 58 percent of Americans, including nearly two-thirds of independents, considered critical of Obama's re-election bid, disapproved of the president's job on the economy.

Yet his personal popularity is up with 52 percent of Americans approving his overall job performance and nearly two-thirds saying he "cares about people like me."

As Whit Ayers, a Republican pollster, cited by the Post put it: "The main worry for Republicans at this point is nominating a strong and credible potential president." And therein lies the key to Obama's second bid for the White House.