According to the Wall Street Journal, “The nation’s high joblessness, already a problem for President Barack Obama as he seeks re-election next year, is shaping up to be a particular burden in a handful of key swing states where the unemployment rate is above the national average.”

The story points out in four states that may prove key to the Obama re-election strategy—Florida, Nevada, North Carolina and Michigan—the jobless picture is “bleak.” In three of the four, the rate tops 10 percent.

“We’re in uncharted waters here,” Charlie Cook, publisher of Cook Political Report, says. “I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to figure out that high unemployment that isn’t getting much better is a huge liability.”

The best spin Mr. Obama’s chief political adviser  David Axelrod was able to provide is this:

If you go back and listen to much of what he talked about in that campaign, he’s been very faithful to it. And at the core of it was, how do we create the kind of life and the kind of future that people want and how do we deal with the ongoing challenges that people were facing in their lives, that the American dream was slipping away, paychecks weren’t growing as fast as costs. And that’s been exacerbated by the economic crisis. But it’s the project that he started to work on, we knew it was going to be a long term project, and that’s what he’s continuing to do.

If the core of the Obama re-election message is: (a) he has been faithful to what he promised America, and (b) a better life and future is a project he has started to work on, then this race will be easier than many of us thought.