Furthermore, Axelrod said: "We don't have the resources or the candidate time to run a race to change national poll numbers, nor do I think we have to. This is a sequential contest, and we're spending time where the process begins."
Nevertheless, the campaign can ill afford to ignore Obama's slipping national support. In an interview in Sunday's New York Times, Obama clearly aimed to calm his increasingly jittery fundraising "bundlers" and high-level backers, vowing to get tougher with Clinton and accusing her of not being truthful about what she would do as president.
On Saturday in Des Moines, he pointedly criticized Clinton for giving vague answers about whether wages above $97,500 should be taxed to fund Social Security; Obama has said they should. In a TV ad released Sunday, he hit the same theme but never mentioned her name.
Echoing a campaign slogan, Axelrod added, "I think people ultimately want change they can believe in. . . . As the people of Iowa get to know Barack, he is that person."
The mantra of change makes its way into every Obama speech. On a chilly evening outside a United Auto Workers hall in Marshalltown, Iowa, he told the crowd that people "want to feel we can still rally together as Americans around a common purpose, a common destiny; that we can solve big problems here in America; . . . that we can put an end to the gridlock and go about the business of changing America. But what we realize is we can't do that just by changing political parties in the White House; we've got to change our politics."
But the "change" message may be problematic, said Dick Bennett, president of the nonpartisan polling firm American Research Group.
"When he talks about representing change, women who are considering Hillary look at him and say, If this is about change, she represents greater change than you do, simply by being a woman," Bennett said. "That has kept her up in the polls, and all the men -- basically husbands of the women who have supported her from the beginning -- are coming around and saying, 'Yes, I'd vote for her.' "
The husbands, Bennett said, are comforted knowing that Bill Clinton will be in the White House with her, "and times were good when he was president."
Some political observers think that Obama has put himself in a box by promising to stay positive. His harshest specific criticism of Clinton is that she lacked good judgment by voting in 2002 for the resolution that authorized President Bush to invade Iraq. Obama, who was running for the U.S. Senate at the time, opposed it.
