'Obama believes it would be a very close race'

Barack Obama and his team believes that the November presidential election is going to be a close race, and the US President wants to make the best of his campaigning time travelling around the country and explaining his vision of America, the White House said.

"I've heard the president say it, as well as others around him -- that we have always believed that this will be a very close race. And that continues to be the President's belief, as well as the belief of those around him," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters at his daily news conference.

Obama is seeking re-election in November and the slow economy and unemployment worries have hit the incumbent's image, with his Republican rival Mitt Romney attacking his performance.

"The President is very focused on traveling around the country explaining to the American people what his vision is; what we need to do to continue moving forward to build the economy, to help it create jobs, to create greater security for the middle class; and why, in this choice between his vision and his proposals and his opponent's, he believes his are the right ones and his opponent's are not," he asserted.

"It is not just a theoretical or hypothetical conversation or comparison because we know from recent direct experience what the results of policies like those promoted by his opponent would be because we know what they were," he said.

He said the Republican administration that inherited a surplus situation in 2001 and floundered it into a USD 1 trillion deficit, when Obama took office, and brought about an economic collapse the likes of which this country hadn't experienced since the Great Depression.

"The policies being promoted by the other side are the policies that were in place leading up to the Great Recession. The President believes that we need to continue along with the kinds of policy that invest in education, invest in clean energy, invest in research and development, deal with our fiscal challenges in a balanced way, protect and build the middle class of the United States," he said.

The US under Obama administration, he said, has been creating private-sector jobs for 30 straight months, 4.6 million private sector jobs.

"We have a situation where manufacturing in this country, which had been in decline since the mid-1990s, has experienced a revival and more than half a million jobs have been created in manufacturing. This is when the President came into office, things were cascading downward at an alarming rate," he said.

He said, however, the President has always stressed that a lot of work is yet to be done.

"We need to implement policies to help the economy grow, that protect the middle class, that don't ask seniors to shoulder the burden of the need to get our fiscal house in order," he said.