Team Obama is all fired up and ready to tear down Mitt Romney. But President Obama still has to resell President Obama.

The negative campaign against Romney — the Republican still expected to win the GOP nomination — is under way and has been through the rise and fall of Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich. It follows a simple narrative:

Romney’s an untrustworthy flip-flopper. He’s a cold-blooded CEO who will lay off workers in the name of restructuring failing companies and pocket the millions that go along with dismantling them. Romney’s the ultimate hypocrite, who bemoans the existence of super PACs, even as he reaps the benefits of a negative advertising blitz launched in their name. He calls out Obama for failed leadership, but ducks the big political issue of the day, such as the payroll tax extension.

Democrats like to tell themselves their case against Romney is strong. After all, it’s buttressed by Romney’s self-damning words on topics ranging from abortion to letting Detroit go bankrupt. Besides the flip-flops, there’s even a video of Romney speaking French when he headed the Olympics, a skill repugnant to huge swaths of Republican voters. But it’s going to take more than that to bring down Romney, even with old footage that shows him describing his views as“progressive” when he was running for office in Massachusetts.

Being forced out of his bubble by Gingrich turned out to be good for Romney. He’s now talking about family, faith, and living in Paris as a young missionary, minus modern plumbing. On the campaign trail, his wife, Ann, is a comfortable and casual counterpoint to Callista Gingrich.

After a much-maligned interview with Brett Baier, Romney sparred efficiently with Bill O’Reilly. He looked stiff but amiable on David Letterman - although when he offered“What’s up, gangstas?” on the top-10 list of things he would tell Americans, it was more proof he will, indeed, say anything to win.

Both Romney and Gingrich are serial flip-floppers. Unlike Gingrich, Romney didn’t flip for money. He did it for something more priceless: ambition. With some critics questioning his toughness, Romney seems to be turning up the rhetorical heat from last century’s“gosh” and“for Pete’s sake.” After Gingrich started whining about negative campaigning, Romney said if Gingrich“can’t stand the heat in this little kitchen, wait until Obama’s Hell’s Kitchen turns up the heat.”

Romney will never be hip or cool. But neither was Ronald Reagan, the president Romney now embraces, long after that Judas moment when he distanced himself from the Gipper - during a Massachusetts campaign, of course.

How could anyone lose to such an opportunist? Democrats know that a president who is slammed as a disappointment by once avid acolytes on the left, like Matt Damon, could lose. A president who let opponents on the right convert“hope” into“hopeless” and“change” into“socialism” could lose. A president whose appearances were once must-see TV, but who is now just another face in the political crowd, could lose. A president once heralded for his eloquence, whose voice is now routinely tuned out, could lose - especially one who is also regularly compared with Jimmy Carter. On the domestic front, Obama let opponents paint health care reform as failure. He somehow let the opposition describe his foreign policy leadership as weak, despite the killing of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Libyan dictator Moammar Khadafy.

Obama’s approval ratings do show some recent signs of rebounding. Forty-nine percent of Americans approve of how Obama is handling his job, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll and another conducted for CNN. The rating was the highest since bin Laden’s death last May. It follows some recent positive economic data and a stretch of criticism from Obama that his Republican opposition is holding Washington hostage to partisan politics.

Obama will need a sustained flow of positive economic data to keep Republicans on the ropes. A president who can’t change jobless statistics could easily lose, no matter how skillfully he casts himself as avatar of the middle class, fighting the axis of Wall Street evil.

Knocking Romney isn’t hard. But the reselling of this president isn’t easy.