Arriving in Montana to join battle with his critics on Friday, President Barack Obama stepped from Air Force One, stripped off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. Little more than six months after he swept into office with some of the highest approval ratings recorded, he is fighting to save his historic presidency from turning into a one-term wonder.

Obama was ready for a vigorous defence of the healthcare reforms that have spawned verbal fisticuffs at public meetings across the country. In the event, the Montana meeting unfolded with a subdued politeness that left some White House aides wishing it had been a little more feisty, so their champion could have shown off his sparring skills.

Yet for all the heat that has recently been generated by the healthcare debate, amid wild accusations about euthanising granny and manipulating mobs, it became clear last week that medicine is far from the president’s only problem, and there may be no early cure for the economic ills that are crippling his promises of change and hope.

Speaking in an aircraft hangar moments after a hailstorm had passed over Bel-grade, Montana, the 48-year-old president attempted to calm the confrontational climate that has soured debate about his attempts to overhaul an expensive and inefficient US healthcare establishment.

Sticking to time-honoured presidential tradition, he blamed the media for getting his message wrong, and for focusing on a minority of angry protesters. “TV loves a ruckus,” he added. “What you haven’t seen on TV . . . are the many constructive meetings going on all over the country.”

Yet in one sense that ruckus has spared the White House closer scrutiny of a stuttering economy that may yet prove Obama’s ruin. Recent optimism that the worst of the recession may be over has failed to make an impact on key areas of American life, and Obama last week endured one of the toughest weeks of his presidency in terms of bad economic news.

“The rapid deterioration of the economy has slowed down,” said Alice Rivlin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. “But if you have lost your job, the worst may not be over for a long time. If you have a job, you may still lose it.”

The main problem for the president is that economic data suggesting improvements in growth and productivity are not yet translating into benefits for victims of recession. Mark Vitner, an economist at Wells Fargo bank, last week summed up future prospects as “a recovery only a statistician can love”.

Obama insisted earlier this month that “actions we’ve taken in the first six months have helped stop our economic freefall . . . we’re losing jobs at half the rate we were at the beginning of the year”.

That boast was promptly undermined when a barrage of negative reports was released last week, showing that personal bankruptcies surged 34% in June compared with last year; the number of homes subjected to foreclosure proceedings rose 32% as against a year ago; the number of people out of work for 27 weeks or longer reached a record 5m; and retail sales dipped in July despite a big boost from a popular secondhand car trade-in programme.

Nor are the short-term prospects encouraging. More than 15m home owners – a third of the US total – are still estimated to have mortgages “underwater”, meaning that they owe their banks more than their homes are worth. Another report indicated that a foreclosure prevention programme, introduced by Obama as part of his economic stimulus package, had helped only 10% of eligible home owners.

The continuing misery has made it hard for the White House to claim much credit for the modest gains recorded – not least because the prime beneficiaries of the fledgling recovery appear to have been the Wall Street bankers whose lust for quick profits started the crisis. The return of multi-million-dollar bonuses is certain to stoke popular outrage that injections of taxpayer money have served mainly to prop up a discredited system based on greed and excess.

Despite these concerns, few doubt that Obama would benefit dramatically from a sudden economic turnaround. Andrew Kohut, a pollster with the Pew Research Centre, noted that a sharp fall in the president’s approval ratings, which according to some polls have slipped below 50% for the first time, has not been matched by a loss of confidence in the future. “People still think that he’s going to fix the economy,” Kohut said.

Yet even Democratic officials admit that the climate has changed. The near-universal pride that Obama inspired as the first black man to be elected president has inevitably been dulled by hardship and conflict.

Awe has given way to anger, and admiring “Obamacan” T-shirt slogans are increasingly giving way to a new form of presidential merchandise best summed up as “Obamacan’t”.

One popular online retailer estimated last week that of 3m Obama-related items about 1m are now “antiObama”. One popular bumper sticker reads: “Don’t blame me – I voted for McCain.”

“Back in April, when the [economic] stimulus [programme] had passed, there was this great sense of hope and, you know, he was a magic man, right?” said Richard Goodstein, a party strategist. “Reality has set in by now.”

Obama now faces a potentially damaging credibility gap between the White House emphasis on hope and recovery and the experience of ordinary Americans. The dangers were evident last week when Christina Rohmer, chairwom-an of the president’s council of economic advisers, declared that the president’s stimulus package had saved “about 485,000 jobs” since February.

The next day, a government report disclosed that 247,000 more Americans had lost their jobs in July. When economists talk of a recession ending, noted Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute, they can be “at total variance” with the public experience.

All this may help explain why the healthcare debate has become so vicious and sporadically violent. Confusing messages from the White House about what exactly the reforms will mean, and how they will be paid for, have presented the Republican opposition with its first real opportunity to rally around a popular cause.

Somehow, over the past few weeks, Obama’s advisers have allowed his promise of “change we can believe in” to turn into a mud-slinging free-for-all about so-called “death panels” that will supposedly decide whether granny and other ageing Americans will be allowed hospital care or left to die untreated.

“The Obama White House has done the near impossible,” said Peggy Noonan, a former Republican speech-writer and conservative columnist. “It has united the Republican party – social conservatives, economic conservatives, libertarians, they are all against the healthcare schemes as presented so far.”

Even some of the president’s staunchest admirers have been bewildered by his messy handling of the issue. Camille Paglia, a prominent feminist academic, said she continued to support Obama because he represented the US “with dignity and authority abroad . . . having said that, I must confess my dismay bordering on horror at the amateurism of the White House apparatus for domestic policy”.

Denouncing the “grotesque mishandling” of healthcare reform, Paglia added: “Who would have thought that the sober, deliberative Barack Obama would have nothing to propose but vague and slippery promises?”

The wispy slickness of Obama’s ideas was on ample display in Montana on Friday, when he insisted to one questioner that “I don’t want government bureaucrats meddling in your healthcare” – which is exactly what his reforms imply.

Nor could the president give a convincing answer to the obvious question of how the reforms will be paid for at a time of economic retrenchment.

“The only way you are going to get that money is to raise our taxes,” he was told by one audience member.

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