Rising Gas Prices Give G.O.P. Issue to Attack Obama

White House officials are preparing for Republicans to use consumer angst about the cost of oil and gas to condemn his energy programs and buttress their argument that his economic policies are not working.

In a closed-door meeting last week, Speaker John A. Boehner instructed fellow Republicans to embrace the gas-pump anger they find among their constituents when they return to their districts for the Presidents’ Day recess.

“This debate is a debate we want to have,” Mr. Boehner told his conference on Wednesday, according to a Republican aide who was present. “It was reported this week that we’ll soon see $4-a-gallon gas prices. Maybe higher. Certainly, this summer will see the highest gas prices in years. Your constituents saw those reports, and they’ll be talking about it.”

Iran’s recent warnings of a disruption in the global oil trade have pushed the price of a barrel of domestic oil to more than $103, a six-month high and up about 34 percent since September. That has helped drive the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline in the United States to $3.52, a 30-cent increase in the past two months. It is already approaching $4 in some places.

Economists say the current price of oil is only a modest drag on the economy. But a big jump — combined with tensions over Iran and continuing European debt worries — could present a more significant challenge to America’s recovery, they say.

For the president’s economic team, the specter of such increases in oil prices comes on the heels of positive economic news that has lifted Mr. Obama’s approval rating, including better-than-expected job growth, a surging stock market and a payroll tax deal that will put more money in the pockets of millions of Americans.

But Mr. Boehner’s message to his members echoes the aggressive talk coming from the Republican campaign trail, where the men vying for the right to challenge Mr. Obama are increasingly blaming Mr. Obama’s administration for rising gas prices. A gallon of gas had dropped to $1.89 when Mr. Obama took office in 2009, in large part because of the fall in oil demand caused by the financial crisis, and has almost doubled since.

“They want higher energy prices. They want to push their radical agenda on the public,” Rick Santorum said at a campaign event last week, accusing Democrats of pushing alternatives to oil. “We need a president who is on the side of affordable energy.”

Newt Gingrich wrote on Twitter on Friday that “gasoline prices are unacceptable. We can do better!” He urged his supporters to sign a petition on his Web site calling for a return to $2.50-a-gallon gas. “Drill here. Drill now. Pay less,” the petition says.

And talking points from the Republican National Committee that go out to conservative commentators every Friday often include rising gas prices among the “Top Line Messaging” for the week. A recent “Pundit Prep” document cited the national debt, unemployment and the price of gas as the three best ways to define the “Obama economy.”

The president’s political advisers are bracing for battle as they envision the price of gas rising steadily through the summer, as it usually does. As the president’s motorcade whisked him through scenic Orange County on Thursday on the way to a California fund-raiser, one sign held by a protester read, “Gas prices up 91 percent under Obama.”

Aides say they know the attacks are inevitable. But they also say they are prepared to respond forcefully with a defense of the president’s energy policies and a critique of the Republican line.

“The president is keenly aware of the impact that higher gas prices have on families trying to make ends meet,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said last week.

For Mr. Obama’s economic team, the increase in oil prices is an unwelcome reminder of how global events largely outside their control can hamper a recovery. For the third year in a row, a modest recovery faces head winds as winter turns to spring.

In the spring of 2010, debt crises in Europe, slowing stimulus spending and weakness in the housing market brought an abrupt halt to a brief turnaround in the United States economy. A year later, turmoil in the Middle East, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and more debt problems in Europe did the same. Now, rising gasoline prices, concern over tensions with Iran and, once again, European debt are causing worries.

Binyamin Appelbaum and Annie Lowrey contributed reporting.

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Plouffe, Obama Aide, Lends Firm Hand to Campaign

Some may call them campaigns, but for David Plouffe, a political adviser to President Obama, they are “brass-knuckle time.”

WASHINGTON — David Plouffe is not a hugger, crier or someone who gets all gaga every time he walks into his West Wing office, just a few feet from that of the president. He disdains doomsayers as “bed-wetters,” press hordes as “jackals” and the political noise machine as a profanity that begins with “cluster.”

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David Plouffe “is the one most in tune with the president's personality,” a colleague says.

Fiercely data-driven, Mr. Plouffe revels in the company of spreadsheets, lists, maps and the Baseball Almanac. Fiercely competitive, he once decked a colleague in a friendly touch football game for taunting him. Fiercely unsentimental, he expends zero amazement over his career climb from selling knives door to door to a first-among-equals status in the White House’s closed circle.

Mr. Plouffe, 44, who managed President Obama’s campaign in the relatively dewy-eyed days of 2008, rejoined his team last year after a lucrative hiatus. Since then, he has asserted himself as the main orchestrator of the White House message, political strategy and day-to-day presentation of the candidate.

If the campaign of four years ago sold Mr. Obama as a force for what Mr. Plouffe called “a politics of unity, hope and common purpose,” this one is rooted firmly in the grind-it-out imperatives of re-election. Today, Mr. Obama seems every bit primed for “brass-knuckle time,” as Mr. Plouffe once termed campaign brawling, with Mr. Plouffe leading an effort that has shown every sign of doing whatever it takes to succeed.

This month, with Mr. Plouffe’s support, Mr. Obama ditched his long opposition to directing his campaign donors to “super PACs” — outside groups whose bankrolling of negative advertising against his Republican rivals has done much to change politics, and not in a “unity, hope and common purpose” kind of way.

Mr. Plouffe (pronounced Pluff) has also pushed for a more combative White House stance toward Congressional Republicans and an aggressive early tack against former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, whom the Obama team still views as its most likely and most formidable opponent in November. It was Mr. Plouffe who declared on “Meet the Press” last fall that Mr. Romney had “no core.”

Intense and self-contained, Mr. Plouffe, who declined to be interviewed for this article, is a temperament alter ego to a president who has always been drawn to loyal fixer types. Mr. Obama, whose favorite movie is “The Godfather,” has compared Mr. Plouffe to a character — a relentless cop played by Mark Wahlberg — in the more recent mob film “The Departed.”

Mr. Obama’s aides are hesitant about discussing the frequency of Mr. Plouffe’s dealings with the re-election effort led by Jim Messina in Chicago, presumably not wanting to suggest he is running the campaign from the White House. Likewise, they are reluctant to characterize Mr. Plouffe’s relationship with the president as special, or suggest that it trumps that of other top lieutenants, particularly Jacob J. Lew, the new chief of staff (Mr. Plouffe is a stickler for hierarchy).

But people inside Mr. Obama’s political apparatus say Mr. Plouffe is most in tune with the president’s thinking in terms of his unsparing focus on the middle class and his abandonment of the bipartisan bridge-building efforts that have mostly failed through his first term.

“The president probably took David’s opinion with more certitude than he did anybody else’s,” said William M. Daley, who left as chief of staff last month after a year in the White House. “If David said X, I think the president would more often believe X than challenge it.” Mr. Daley added that Mr. Obama would be more likely to heed Mr. Plouffe’s advice than his or that of other longtime confidants, the senior advisers Valerie Jarrett and Pete Rouse.

Mr. Plouffe’s history with the president ensures him a rarified place in any Obama endeavor. He became a folk hero within the grass-roots network in 2008, his sleep-deprived face and deadpan delivery evoking urgency (and twiggy frame crying out for cheeseburgers). Mr. Plouffe approaches campaigns with a tribal sense of good-vs.-evil, rarely seeing much humanity in opponents. (He assumed that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s crying episode before the New Hampshire primary in 2008 was “deviously contrived and staged,” he wrote in his campaign memoir, “The Audacity to Win.”)

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Santorum Defends Remarks on Obama and Public Schools

But a number of his statements over the weekend drew criticism, illustrating one of the perils of political success: the same acclaim that brings confidence also brings greatly increased scrutiny.

Mr. Santorum, who is surging in national polls, accused President Obama of “a phony theology,” likened public schools to “factories” and criticized prenatal testing as a way of encouraging society to “cull the ranks of the disabled.”

As he emerges as a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination, Mr. Santorum is moving from a generic alternative to Mitt Romney to a specific brand of conservative who will be known and judged by his own views. All weekend, he was forced to explain and defend his more provocative remarks, maintaining that some were distorted in the echo chamber of the Internet and the news media.

Keith Nahigian, who managed the presidential campaign of Representative Michele Bachmann, another candidate whose provocative remarks drew scrutiny when she was briefly atop the polls, said Mr. Santorum now stood to have his statements parsed far more closely and to become fodder for other Republicans, as well as for Democrats.

If Mr. Santorum were to win the Michigan primary on Feb. 28 and Ohio on March 6 — two states where polls suggest that he has a chance of defeating Mr. Romney — “he could very easily have a path to the nomination,” Mr. Nahigian said. “Here we are in the ninth inning, and people don’t know who he is.”

Alex Castellanos, a Republican strategist not affiliated with any of the candidates, said, “Santorum is now being tested — not just his position on issues, it’s his stability, his maturity that is being tested.”

On Saturday in Ohio, Mr. Santorum described the “president’s agenda” as being “about some phony ideal, some phony theology. Not a theology based on the Bible.”

After a spokesman for the Obama campaign called it “the latest low,” Mr. Santorum told reporters he was not suggesting that Mr. Obama was not a Christian.

“Obviously, as we all know in the Christian church, there are a lot of different stripes of Christianity,” Mr. Santorum said. “I’m just saying he’s imposing his values on the church, and I think that’s wrong.”

Questioned further about the remark on Sunday, Mr. Santorum said he had meant that Mr. Obama’s worldview placed care of the earth and natural resources above human needs.

“The earth is not the objective,” he said on “Face the Nation” on CBS News. “Man is the objective, and I think that a lot of radical environmentalists have it upside down.”

At another point on Saturday, Mr. Santorum repeated his skepticism about the government’s role in public education. He harked back to a pre-industrial 19th century when many Americans, including presidents, home-schooled their children.

The public school, Mr. Santorum said, arose “when people came off the farms where they did home-school or have the little neighborhood school, and into these big factories, so we built equal factories called public schools.”

Education reformers on both the left and right criticize the uniformity of instruction that dates from mass public education. But Mr. Santorum, who home-schooled some of his own children, makes many education advocates nervous because he seems to want to substantially scale back or cancel federal and state guidelines on standards and equality of access.

Mr. Santorum also criticized Mr. Obama’s health care law over the weekend, in part because it requires insurance plans to offer free prenatal testing. “Free prenatal testing,” he said, “ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society.”

“That, too, is part of Obamacare, another hidden message as to what President Obama thinks of those who are less able than the elites who want to govern our country,” Mr. Santorum said.

The remarks might win Mr. Santorum further support from evangelical Christians and Catholics who have been galvanized by the Catholic Church’s opposition to the president’s insistence that religious-affiliated hospitals and schools offer health plans with free contraception.

But the issue also risks pushing away voters, especially women, who find in such stances an assault on women’s control over their own health decisions. Mr. Santorum has said that as a Catholic, he opposes contraception.

On Sunday, Mr. Santorum spoke to more than 3,000 people at First Redeemer Church here, and offered another statement that could prove controversial.

In a long analogy, he compared the threat to Americans’ freedom under Mr. Obama to the “great peril” of World War II and likened the present moment to the isolationist period when Americans were complacent about “this guy over in Europe.” Unlike the challenge for the “greatest generation,” Mr. Santorum said, there is no “cataclysmic event” to rally around.

In his string of provocative remarks, some strategists see calibration. “Santorum knows exactly what he is saying and doing it for a reason,” said Mark McKinnon, who was a strategist for President George W. Bush’s campaigns. “Santorum is too smart and too disciplined for his comments to be mistakes.”

His statements also might work by further eclipsing Newt Gingrich, his main rival for conservatives seeking an alternative to Mr. Romney.

But some say there is a risk for him in the new scrutiny.

“You get under the glare of that light,” Mr. Castellanos said, and “a lot of people catch on fire.”

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Obama Hails ‘Insourcing’ at Wisconsin Factory

Alas, it was not to be; Mr. Walker, a Republican who is facing a recall election that he has boldly predicted will be a bellwether for Mr. Obama’s own chances in Wisconsin, pulled out of the joint tour with the president at the last minute. Mr. Walker’s spokesman told reporters that the governor had the flu so he would not join Mr. Obama to congratulate Master Lock for bringing jobs back to the United States.

Mr. Walker was apparently not too sick to show up at the airport to greet Mr. Obama, however, presenting the president with a Milwaukee Brewers baseball jersey and demurely declining, in a brief chat afterward with reporters, to take a whack at the president.

“Today’s the president’s day,” he said, when reporters traveling with Mr. Obama tried to egg him on. “I’m appreciative he’s in Wisconsin, appreciative he’s focused on manufacturing. We’ll leave politics for another day.”

Mr. Obama also has ostensibly been leaving politics for another day, focusing his remarks at Master Lock on the need to rein in unfair trading practices from China and restore American manufacturing jobs. He trotted out — again and again — the administration’s new catchphrase, insourcing.

“You’ve all heard enough about outsourcing,” Mr. Obama said. “Well, more and more companies like Master Lock are now insourcing. They’re deciding that if the cost of doing business here is no longer much different than the cost of doing business in countries like China, they’d rather place their bets on America.”

Mr. Obama — who, aides say, expressed concerns about unfair competition on Tuesday when China’s presumed next leader, Vice President Xi Jinping, visited the White House — several times made Beijing the counterpoint to his manufacturing narrative. He promised to use his just-announced trade enforcement unit to focus on investigating unfair trade practices in China.

The president did make an indirect — albeit transparent — dig at the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, whose recent efforts to explain his 2008 “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” column, in light of the Michigan primary on Feb. 28, have been delighting Obama supporters.

Mr. Obama pointedly held his bailout of the American auto industry as an example of how government intervention can help manufacturing jobs. “There were some folks,” he began, allowing a long, pointed pause, “who said we should just let it die.”

“With a million jobs at stake, I refused to let that happen,” he said, in a line that appears destined for campaign speeches to come. “And today, the American auto industry is back.”

Mr. Obama’s stop in Milwaukee is the beginning of a three-day trip that is mostly a money run. After Milwaukee, the president was scheduled for stops in Southern California for several fund-raisers, including one co-hosted by the actor Will Ferrell. Then it is on to San Francisco for more fund-raisers, and Seattle, where he planned to make remarks at a Boeing facility before hitting another fund-raiser.

In Los Angeles and San Francisco, the president will have to walk a fine line between Hollywood and Silicon Valley, two big contributors to his campaign who have been at each other’s throats over the online piracy issue.

“I believe the president enjoys support from people in both industries,” the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, told reporters traveling with the president. “We are absolutely committed to working to find solutions to the problem of copyright infringement and intellectual property rights infringement, but we need to do it in a way that doesn’t restrict Internet freedom.”

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Why Obama Will Embrace the 99 Percent

The last time I considered Barack Obama’s re-election chances in this magazine, in mid-November, things were looking pretty bleak for the president. The statistical model I used measured three key factors — a president’s approval rating, economic growth and the ideological orientation of his opponent — and taken together, they showed that Obama had become a slight underdog to win re-election.

Three months later, his position is much stronger.

In January, 243,000 jobs were created. The number surprised investors and economists, but it was part of a stream of solid economic data: over the last few months, consumer confidence has gone up, Americans have spent more on big-ticket items like cars and there is even evidence that the housing market has begun to rebound. Before the job numbers came out, most economists were expecting around 2.5 percent G.D.P. growth this year. Those forecasts are liable to be revised upward now, perhaps to about 3 percent.

Americans seem to have noticed the change. By early February, Obama’s approval rating had climbed to 49 percent in the Real Clear Politics average, a six-point improvement from three months earlier. Although it’s not a terrific approval rating, it may be enough to get Obama another term. In 2004, George W. Bush won a narrow victory with essentially identical metrics: G.D.P. growth of 2.9 percent and an approval rating of about 48 percent on Election Day.

Still, Obama’s position isn’t solid enough for him to beat just anybody. Bush benefited from running against a middling opponent like John Kerry, against whom he was able to squeeze every ounce out of his approval rating.

The model I created evaluates the strength of the opposition candidate by considering his ideology on a left-to-right scale. Candidates who are closer to the center have historically done better than those closer to the wings. (I’ve updated the model’s measure of ideology to account for new data.)

Obama’s most likely Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, continues to rate as a “generic Republican.” In fact, he now scores at exactly 50 on the 100-point scale from centrist to extremist. That means an election against Romney, like Bush’s against Kerry, would mostly be dictated by the fundamentals of the economy and by evaluations of Obama’s job performance. With 2.5 percent G.D.P. growth from now through November, Obama would be a 60 percent favorite to win the popular vote.

The popular vote is one thing, however. The Electoral College is another — and Romney could have more vulnerabilities there.

In recent weeks, Obama has taken a more populist approach (just read the transcript of his State of the Union address). The strategy has induced more howls than usual from Republicans about “class warfare,” but the White House has clearly studied the numbers. In the Republican primaries, Romney has had trouble winning the loyalty of working-class voters, especially in the Midwest. And recent polls suggest that Romney, who has a penchant for making intemperate comments that draw attention to his wealth, could struggle among that group in the general election as well.

So let’s conduct a thought experiment. Suppose that against Romney, Obama does 10 points better among white voters whose households make less than $50,000 per year. The trade-off is that he does 10 points worse among whites making $100,000 or more and 15 points worse among whites making at least $200,000.

In terms of the popular vote, this would almost exactly balance out. The effect would be more substantial, however, in individual states.

In wealthy Virginia, Obama would lose a net of 2.5 percentage points to Romney under these rules, according to the demographics from the 2008 exit poll there. He would also be harmed by 2.7 points in Colorado. And Romney would have a chance of putting New Jersey into play, because he would gain four full points there. (The Chris-Christie-for-V.P. train will be departing from Platform 1.)

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White House Memo: Obama Balancing Donors in Hollywood and Silicon Valley

First, the soothing. Mr. Obama is flying to Los Angeles on Wednesday to attend three fund-raisers, including one hosted by the actor Will Ferrell and Bradley Bell, a soap opera executive (“The Bold and the Beautiful”). The Foo Fighters will be on hand to perform; expect to see a number of other glitterati.

Problem: Mr. Obama is in the doghouse with the show-business people, who are mad because the White House didn’t support them on the antipiracy bill that got squashed in Congress in January after Google and other Internet high fliers descended on Washington to pressure the White House and Congress to oppose it in a standoff that left Hollywood reeling. But the president has also come to rely on cash from Hollywood, which contributed $9.2 million to his 2008 campaign coffers, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Christopher J. Dodd, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America, created a stir — and ruffled White House feathers — just after the drubbing last month when he threatened to turn off the spigot, saying in an interview with Fox News: “Those who count on quote Hollywood for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them.” The White House acknowledged privately that his comment was not received warmly.

But, as if to prove Mr. Dodd’s point, the Center for Responsive Politics reports that money for Mr. Obama from Hollywood was down last year, coming in at just $1.2 million, compared with $2.8 million during the same period in 2008.

White House officials have been doing some stroking of Hollywood to prevent a further erosion; Mr. Obama began the effort during his State of the Union speech last month when he threw the motion picture association a bone, promising to work to protect intellectual property in China. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. picked up the effort on Tuesday, using a lunchtime toast at the State Department with China’s vice president, Xi Jinping, to further raise the intellectual property protection issue — giving his boss the perfect entrée to say at Mr. Ferrell’s fund-raiser that the White House is fighting hard for Hollywood.

But at the same time, administration officials say they don’t plan to reverse their position that major elements of the piracy legislation sought by Hollywood go too far.

On that battle, Google and the techies, so far, have been the clear-cut winner, and they will be able to thank Mr. Obama on Thursday when he heads to San Francisco for Part 2 of his balancing act: he is headlining a fund-raiser at the home of Nicola Miner, daughter of the Oracle co-founder Robert Miner.

And there, Mr. Obama must assure well-heeled attendees that he will take the interests of the new economy to heart. And the high-tech industry at the heart of that new economy has surpassed Hollywood in fund-raising muscle, not to mention overall contribution to the national economy.

In many ways, the fight puts Mr. Obama in a script that could be conceived only in Hollywood. An online piracy bill backed by the big studios was chugging along until it ran into a firestorm in January when Web powerhouses backed by Internet activists rallied opposition to the legislation through Internet blackouts. The White House had a few days earlier released a statement that some parts of the bill went too far, adding wind to the Web storm. By the time the dust cleared, lawmakers had backed off, and the old guard in Hollywood was fuming.

“It’s the Rebellion versus the Empire,” said Donnie Fowler, a Democratic consultant who was Al Gore’s national field director in the 2000 campaign, with Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook as Luke Skywalker and Mr. Dodd as Darth Vader.

“The problem for Hollywood here,” Mr. Fowler said, “is that they contribute only about 1/10th as much to the national economy” as technology. “Plus their stars and starlets can’t match up against hundreds of thousands of netizens who go nuts when their Wikipedia and Google go dark for a day.”

Despite Mr. Dodd’s comments about payback, some political observers note that at the end of the day, it is unlikely that Hollywood will suddenly turn to the Republicans.

“I think this is yet another large industry that has been a consistent supporter of Obama, that has to handle some disappointment from time to time,” said Matt Bennett, a vice president at Third Way, a Democratic policy institute. “They’ll swallow hard and contribute.”

But they may not contribute quite so much.

Kate Bedingfield, Mr. Dodd’s spokeswoman, did offer up a clarification of his remarks. Mr. Dodd, she said, “was making the obvious point that people tend to support politicians whose views tend to match their own.”

Mr. Dodd himself has since been more circumspect. “We hope the president will use this opportunity in both communities,” he said in an e-mailed statement, “to reiterate the important point that he made in the State of the Union: that online content theft is a problem, that it harms U.S. workers and U.S. business and that now is the time to come together to find meaningful solutions to protect American intellectual property from foreign criminals.”

He added that Hollywood and the tech industry “need each other to succeed and grow.”

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The Choice Blog: Obama Proposes Community College to Career Fund

Making a college list, filing applications, and marshaling the resources to afford an education can be intimidating. But it need not be. Join Jacques Steinberg, New York Times education writer and author of “The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College,’’ as he and his colleagues examine all facets of the college admissions process. You can reach Mr. Steinberg by sending e-mail to thechoicenyt@gmail.com.

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Economy Lifts Obama in New York Times/CBS News Poll

Matthew Ryan Williams for The New York TimesRick Santorum, who was in a statistical tie with Mitt Romney in a New York Times/CBS News poll, spoke in Idaho on Tuesday.

President Obama’s political standing is rising along with voters’ optimism that the economy is getting better, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, a shift that coincides with continued Republican disquiet over the field of candidates seeking to replace him.

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Doug Cameron of  Spokane, Wash., listened to Mr. Santorum in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Nearly half of registered voters polled said they had not yet formed an opinion about Mr. Santorum.

Consecutive months of job growth, the bullish stock market and improving consumer demand appear to be benefiting — for now, at least — a president who stated outright three years ago that his chances for a second term would depend on his ability to persuade the country that its economy was on the mend by this very month.

In what could be a turning point, the percentage of people who said they believed the economic outlook was improving is now greater, by double digits, than the percentage of those who said they believed it was getting worse, a reversal from a low point in September, when pessimists outnumbered optimists by more than three to one.

Showing steady improvement since early December, Mr. Obama’s approval rating has reached the 50 percent mark in The Times/CBS News poll — an important baseline in presidential politics and his highest approval rating since May 2010 (excepting the brief bump he received after Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011).

For the first time since the election season began in earnest in the late summer, as many Democratic voters as Republicans said they were more enthusiastic than usual about voting in the 2012 presidential election. That would appear to wipe out the “enthusiasm gap” that promised to help Republicans greatly next fall.

Their combative contest remains in flux, with former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania now in a statistical tie with Mitt Romney after Mr. Santorum’s victories in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri. Mr. Santorum’s sharp rise in the polls underscores some of Mr. Romney’s perceived weaknesses, with voters saying that Mr. Santorum shares their values and that they connect to his blue-collar economic message.

Polls can capture only a specific moment in time. To the extent that Mr. Obama’s improved standing is tied to the economy, it is tenuous. Grim economic news continues to trickle out of Europe. Iranian saber rattling is increasing the sense of instability in the Middle East. Even the White House warns that jobless numbers are as likely to rise in the coming months as they are to dip.

More people said they disapproved of Mr. Obama’s handling of the economy, 50 percent, than said they approved, 44 percent. And he received poor marks on his handling of the federal budget deficit, with 59 percent of poll respondents expressing disapproval.

Mr. Obama led all four remaining Republican presidential candidates in theoretical one-on-one competitions, including the presumed front-runner, Mr. Romney But the president’s general election prospects could change drastically when the opposition finally settles on a nominee, who will most likely win an immediate boost of support and enthusiasm, if history is a guide.

Yet the poll results show how hard it is to predict how quickly the Republicans will reach that juncture.

Eight nominating contests, about 20 closely watched debates and several months of heavy state-by-state campaigning have seemingly failed to settle a restive Republican electorate that is highly motivated in its goal of limiting Mr. Obama to a single term but shows lingering signs of nervous indecision about whom it wants to assign the task of taking him on.

Republican primary voters indicated they were less than satisfied with their choices, with more than 6 in 10 saying they wished there were more candidates to choose from, and nearly the same number saying they could change their minds. The instability of the Republican presidential race is now redounding to the benefit of Mr. Santorum, whose new strength points up the persistent weaknesses that Mr. Romney has with those who describe themselves as evangelical Christians, supportive of the Tea Party or conservative, all of whom favored Mr. Santorum in the latest poll.

Republicans who described themselves as primary and caucus voters still overwhelmingly view Mr. Romney as the candidate best equipped to defeat Mr. Obama, but that was not the most important quality for them in the poll; it ranked far behind “strong moral character.”

That mood has appeared to help Mr. Santorum, who frequently promotes his family life with his wife, Karen, and their seven children, and has long had a reputation for his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.

“Rick Santorum seems by and large the most truly conservative candidate, instead of just portraying himself as a conservative,” Jonathan Reed, 52, of Sylvester, Ga., said in a follow-up interview.

But Republican primary voters also chose economic issues as paramount over social issues, and they viewed Mr. Santorum as the candidate who would most help middle-class Americans. In addition, more than two-thirds of them said his political philosophy was just right, not too conservative or too liberal.

Dalia Sussman, Marjorie Connelly and Marina Stefan contributed reporting.

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Obama Shift on Contraception Splits Catholics

The leaders of several large Catholic organizations that work directly on poverty, health care and education have welcomed the president’s plan as a workable compromise that has the potential to protect religious freedom while allowing employees who request it to have contraceptives covered by their insurance plans.

The bishops, however, have continued to voice strong objections to the White House plan. And they have taken it one step further, arguing that individual Catholics who own businesses should not have to provide birth control to their employees in their health insurance coverage.

The uproar threatens to embroil the Catholic church in a bitter election-year political battle while deepening internal rifts within the church. On the one side are traditionalists who believe in upholding Catholic doctrine to the letter, and on the other, modernists who believe the church must respond to changing times and a pluralistic society.

To many Catholics, it is reminiscent of the rifts that surfaced in 1968 when Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical “Humanae Vitae,” which reaffirmed the prohibition on artificial contraception, disregarding a Vatican commission’s recommendation to do away with the ban.

Now, as then, even the nuns are not on the same page. The organization that represents a majority of women’s religious orders, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, said the Obama administration had listened to the concerns of Catholics and found a “fair and helpful way to move forward.”

But a traditionalist order in Ann Arbor, Mich., the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, which was formed 15 years ago and has about 100 members, said in a statement that the “so-called compromise” by the White House was “insulting.”

Leslie Tentler, professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington, said: “Part of what is going on is a larger authority issue of who speaks for the church. And I think most Catholics would take exception to the bishops’ argument that only the bishops get to say what is Catholic morality in very difficult situations.

“It also reflects the unresolved status of the teaching on contraception, which is widely violated not just by Catholics, but also by the clergy, who don’t even talk about the issue,” said Dr. Tentler, the author of “Catholics and Contraception: An American History.”

A new New York Times/CBS News poll has found that 57 percent of Catholic voters supported the requirement for religiously affiliated employers, like hospitals or universities, to cover the full cost of birth control for their employees, while 36 percent opposed it (7 percent said they did not know). There was almost no difference between Catholic and other voters on the question.

At issue is a provision in the health care overhaul passed in 2010 requiring employers to offer preventive care, including free birth control. The Department of Health and Human Services announced on Jan. 20 that parishes and houses of worship would be exempted from the requirement, but that other religiously affiliated employers, like Catholic hospitals and universities, would still have to pay for the coverage.

The bishops called the rule an affront to religious liberty and a violation of Catholic conscience. After three weeks of protest that united the bishops with many priests, nuns and prominent Catholic laypeople from the political right and left, the Obama administration announced what it called a compromise on Friday. It said that the Catholic institutions would not have to pay for the birth control coverage or refer their employees to it, but that it would all be covered directly by the insurance companies.

The contrast in responses from Catholic organizations has been more a matter of tone than content. They are all in agreement that certain issues still need to be worked out, like what to do about Catholic institutions that are “self-insured,” meaning that they act as both the insurer and the employer.

Yet some struck an optimistic tone, greeting the White House’s announcement as a good-faith step forward. Those groups included the Catholic Health Association, which represents 600 hospitals and 1,400 health care facilities, plus Catholic Charities, the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. They said that details like what to do about “self-insurance” could be worked out.

The Rev. Gregory Lucey, president of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, which represents 28 institutions, said: “I really am appreciative of what the president did last Friday. I’m optimistic and hopeful, and I feel the religious liberty issue is addressed.”

Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, sounded a more sober tone in an interview on Tuesday, saying, “We don’t see any substantial change, and we worry this raises more questions than it gives answers.”

Archbishop Dolan, who is in Rome for the ceremony on Saturday when he will be made a cardinal, said: “We are still afraid that we are being called upon to subsidize something we find morally illicit. There is still no attention to what you might call the deeper philosophical issues, namely, ‘What right does a federal bureau have to define the who, what, where and how of religious practice?’ ”

The controversy sounds to many Catholic leaders like a replay of the fight over the health care overhaul passed in 2010. Catholic bishops had been advocating universal health care since 1919, and yet ultimately they nearly blocked the passage of the health care bill in 2010 because, they said, it did not go far enough to ensure that federal money would not be used to pay for abortions.

This time, Catholic leaders who work in health care said in interviews that they did not want to see the controversy over religious liberty and contraception get in the way of implementing the health care overhaul.

Sister Anne Curtis, a member of the leadership team of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, a religious order with 3,800 members based in Silver Spring, Md., said, “Our hope is to work out this one aspect of this health care legislation so that health care can be made available for all.”

Sister Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association,  said: “My special interest is that in 2014, the 32 or so million people who do not now have health insurance will get access to health care. It’s a huge impact on the lives of many people in this country. I’ve been in health care for 40 years; I know they’re suffering.”

Sharon Otterman contributed reporting from Rome.

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Obama to seek more Alzheimer's research money

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration is increasing spending on Alzheimer's research — planning to surpass half a billion dollars next year — as part of a quest to find effective treatments for the brain-destroying disease by 2025.

In a two-part plan announced Tuesday, the National Institutes of Health immediately will devote an extra $50 million dementia research, on top of the $450 million a year it currently spends. The boost opens the possibility that at least one stalled study of a possible therapy might get to start soon.

Next week, President Barack Obama will ask Congress for $80 million in new money to spend for Alzheimer's research in 2013.

"The science of Alzheimer's disease has reached a very interesting juncture," with promising new findings to pursue after years of false starts, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins told The Associated Press. "We would love to be able to come up with a way of bringing forward an even larger amount of support."

Patient advocates have long said the nation's spending on Alzheimer's research is far too little considering the disease's current and coming toll. More than 5 million people already have Alzheimer's or related dementias, a number that, barring a medical breakthrough, is expected to more than double by 2050 because of the aging population. By then, the medical and nursing home bills are projected to cost $1 trillion annually.

At a meeting last month, some of the government's own Alzheimer's advisers said it could take a research investment of as much as $2 billion a year to make a real impact. "Our country cannot afford not to make these commitments," Alzheimer's Association President Harry Johns told that meeting.

For comparison, the government spends nearly $3 billion on AIDS research; about 1.1 million Americans are living with the AIDS virus.

But Tuesday, advocates praised the administration for making a needed down payment in tough economic times.

"This is a positive step forward. It's going to take additional steps on the journey that's going to get us to the end of this," Johns said.

"There is no doubt that there is commitment that needs to be applauded here," added Eric J. Hall, president of the Alzheimer's Foundation of America.

The move is part of the administration's development of the first National Alzheimer's Plan, to combine research toward better treatments — the goal is to have some by 2025 — along with steps to help overwhelmed families better cope today. In addition to the biomedical research, the administration said it will propose spending $26 million for other goals of the still-to-be-finalized plan, including caregiver support.

"Reducing the burden of Alzheimer's disease on patients and their families is an urgent national priority," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said.

Given the nation's fiscal problems, it's not clear what the chances are in Congress for a boost in next year's Alzheimer's funding.

But for this year, Collins said Alzheimer's is such a priority that the NIH will shift some of its budget from other research areas to eke out an extra $50 million right away.

Among his examples: Some cutting-edge gene-mapping will be directed to concentrate on uncovering the genetics of Alzheimer's, including what protects the brains of some people in dementia-prone families. Collins also said he will determine whether the extra money is enough to start some clinical trials that otherwise would have to wait, including one to test whether an intranasal form of insulin might reach and protect the brain cells of people with early dementia symptoms.

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Obama boosts funds for Alzheimer's research

(Reuters) - The Obama administration plans to spend an additional $156 million over the next two years to help find an effective treatment for Alzheimer's, a fatal brain-wasting disease that affects more than 5 million Americans.

The White House said on Tuesday it will spend and extra $50 million this year, and it will seek an extra $80 million in fiscal 2013 to bolster Alzheimer's research. Obama also plans to spend an additional $26 million in programs to support people who care for Alzheimer's patients.

The spending increase is intended help make good on a U.S. target set last month to find a way to treat or prevent Alzheimer's by 2025, a goal some experts fear is too ambitious.

Current drugs help manage symptoms but so far no therapy can stop the progression of Alzheimer's, which can start with vague memory loss and confusion before progressing to complete disability and death.

Experts predict that without an effective treatment, the number of Americans with Alzheimer's will double by 2050 and related healthcare costs could soar to more than $1 trillion a year.

These projections are simply staggering," National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins said in a statement. "This new funding will accelerate NIH's effort to use the power of science to develop new ways of helping people with Alzheimer's disease and those at risk."

The $50 million cash infusion this year brings the U.S. Alzheimer's research budget to half a billion dollars, an improvement, advocates say, but still far short of what the nation spends on other chronic diseases.

The spending will support the nation's first comprehensive plan to fight Alzheimer's disease, an effort mandated by the National Alzheimer's Project Act signed into law by President Barack Obama last year.

The project will coordinate government-wide efforts to prevent and treat the disease and create a national strategy for Alzheimer's.

Australia, France and South Korea already have comprehensive Alzheimer's plans, and global experts have been urging the United States to take a leadership role.

"Today's announcement reflects this administration's commitment to confronting Alzheimer's, a disease that takes a devastating toll on millions of Americans," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement.

So far, U.S. investment in the search for Alzheimer's treatments has fallen short of what the nation spends on other chronic diseases, such as cancer and heart disease.

Roughly $6 billion is spent each year by the NIH on cancer, which affects about 12 million Americans, and more than $4 billion on heart disease, which kills more than 800,000 nationally each year.

Alzheimer's advocates advising the HHS on its research strategy have said it will take as much as $2 billion a year in research funding to make a significant difference in finding an effective treatment.

"This infusion of funds is important," said Harry Johns, president and CEO of the Alzheimer's Association, who called the disease "the public health crisis of this century."

Dr. Ronald Petersen, a Mayo Clinic researcher who chairs the HHS Advisory Council on Alzheimer's Research, said he sees the announcement as a good faith gesture by the administration.

"In these times, one could not realistically expect a billion or 2 billion dollars to be allocated in next year's budget," Petersen told Reuters.

But over the long haul, he said it will take a significant amount of funds to meet that target.

(Reporting By Julie Steenhuysen; Editing by Bill Trott and Jackie Frank)

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