Welcome to the world as it was supposed to be for Barack Obama. Standing outside his campaign headquarters on St Charles Street in New Orleans, Cedric Richmond, the Democratic candidate, saluted a "great president" and rattled off the supposed benefits to his district of the Obama administration's reforms.

Obama's economic stimulus bill, he argued, created 39,000 jobs in New Orleans. Some 189,000 people in the city who had no health insurance will now be covered.

"He's right on the issues and he's creating the kind of change that people believed in two years ago," said Richmond. "We didn't think the change would be easy, but he's initiated the type of reform to get us out of the hole Bush created."

Richmond, a state representative, is poised to capture a Republican seat in Tuesday's midterm elections.

His campaign literature features him standing between Barack and Michelle Obama, grinning because he knows the Obama magic means votes and victory. Inside his headquarters, a team of Obama for America volunteers sent down from Washington to help Richmond were hitting phone lines to urge voters to turn out. Richmond, like two-thirds of the district's voters, is black.

A couple of hours and a few blocks away on Magazine Street, Congressman Joseph Cao, Richmond's Republican opponent and the first Vietnamese-American to be elected to Congress when he won two years ago, cut a lonely figure. Having voted against Mr Obama's final health care bill in March, he is widely expected to lose his seat.

The problem for Obama is that Cao might well be the only incumbent Republican in the country to do so. Louisiana's 2nd Congressional District is an anomaly, the mirror image of what is happening across America.

Elsewhere, Democrats are denying links to Obama, running away from their votes for health care reform and conveniently leaving their party affiliation off their election literature.

Far from being an asset to his party, Obama is widely seen as a liability.

In the closing days of the campaign for Tuesday's midterm elections, he is not wanted by the Democratic candidates in states like Kentucky, West Virginia or even Colorado, where there are knife-edge Senate battles.

While his predecessor Bill Clinton has held more than 100 events across the country, Obama is limiting himself to the friendly turf of Democratic "blue states".

On Saturday night, he will campaign in Chicago. That he is being forced to defend his home city in deep-blue Illinois, where his old Senate seat is in danger of falling to Republicans, speaks volumes about his predicament.

The irony of Obama being the blue-state president is acute. Back in 2004, the then state senator shot to international attention by mocking the pundits who "like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States".

He declared: "There's not a liberal America and a conservative America. There's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America. There's the United States of America."

Central to Obama's appeal in 2008 was his pledge to change Washington and to reach across the political aisle to work with Republicans in a new era of bipartisanship and co-operation.

Tell that to Congressman Cao. A softly-spoken, diminutive man who hates glad-handing and is too shy to ask people to vote for him, Cao is the antithesis of the bomb-throwing Tea Party candidate. A centrist, no Republican in the House of Representatives has proved more willing to work with the White House.

As a former Roman Catholic seminarian, he felt he could not support the final version of health care legislation out of conscience, believing it opened the door to taxpayer-funded abortion. It passed without a single Republican vote.

Talking about Obama, Cao sounds mournful, recalling how he had been invited to watch the Super Bowl with him (he missed it because he was caught in a blizzard) and had attended the annual Easter Egg Roll at the White House. The last time the men spoke, he said, was when Mr Obama shouted out "Good to see you Joe" at a bill-signing ceremony in July.

But when I ask him about Obama's attempts at bipartisanship, there was a flash of indignation. "He did talk about that," Cao responds. "So I'm wondering why he endorsed my opponent and made an advertisement for him."

As of last week, Richmond was the only candidate in the country for whom Obama cut a television ad. That was Cao's reward for his attempts at bipartisanship in Washington.

Swept into power on a wave of adulation and talk of an historic new era, Obama never felt he needed to work with Republicans. It took him 18 months before he invited Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, to the White House.

Rather than Obama picking up the phone, the meeting was brokered by Trent Lott and Tom Daschle, two former Senate Majority leaders who are now lobbyists. Boehner, like Obama, is an avid golfer but the President has never seen fit to ask the Republican leader in the House to join him on the links.

Having moved serenely through life being complimented on being the first and the best at everything, Obama felt that his transcendent presence and intellect would be enough.

Believing he would be a great president, Obama wanted to tackle what he saw as the grand issues, not the small-bore concerns of Americans struggling to make ends meet. Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, he calculated, so deal-making was not necessary.

The problem was that his world view was that of a conventional liberal Democrat but he was president of a nation that was centre-right. His victory came from those who wanted him to change Washington, not America.

These days, it is not difficult to find Obama voters who are disillusioned.

"I voted for him and I believed in him but I'm beginning to feel that he's overreached," said Christopher Quail, an English-born former Dominican priest who has lived in New Orleans for 35 years. "Something's gone wrong. He put his favourite projects ahead of the necessities. He tackled health care instead of the economy."

If the likes of Cao and Quail are the lost centre then the small-government, anti-tax Tea Party is the resurgent Right.

In St George, Utah, Ray Carpenter, a retired electronics engineer and Tea Party supporter, said that Obama's only great achievement was to reawaken America and to force a silent majority of conservatives to become activists.

"Obama has forced people to think faster than they would have done had he not engaged in such an active campaign to destroy the country. He's had a shock effect. When he hit us so hard, he jolted people awake."

Obama's high-minded appeals for national unity are no more. His electoral strategy is one of desperate damage limitation. Most pollsters expect Democrats to lose more than 50 seats and control of the House of Representatives.

They will probably keep control of the Senate but at least six seats look lost. Obama's response has been to "slice and dice" the electorate in the way he condemned. He endured the indignity of being called "dude" on Jon Stewart's Comedy Central show as the price for enticing young voters.

He's appeared on the Reverend Al Sharpton's internet radio show to woo black voters. On Univision radio, he told Latino voters of the need to "punish our enemies". He routinely attacks Fox News and Karl Rove, President George W. Bush's former adviser, as a way of energising liberals.

That is the way Obama is now dealing with the reality of world as it is, rather than as he expected it to be.