Truesee's Daily Wonder

But mostly jobs. "If Obama was in this chair right here, I would tell him to give me a job. That's what I would ask for," said customer E.J. Jones one recent afternoon. Jones has worked off and on since he was let go from an Army ammunition plant in 2008.

The recession was especially rough on Kansas City's black community, where unemployment is 15 percent, nearly three times the rate for whites. Adams pointed to the empty chairs in his shop. He's down 75 customers a week. Of Obama, he said: "That man has a hell of a workload, and Bush left a hell of a mess. I like what he's doing. But I can't feel it."

Despite his frustration with the slow pace of the recovery, Adams, who has portraits of the first family on the walls of his shop, doesn't think Obama bears the blame for his troubles. And neither do most black Americans. Just the opposite: Polls show that 90 percent of African Americans believe Obama is doing a good job, far higher than the president's overall 46 percent approval rating. Obama's popularity has dropped among nearly every segment of the population -- old, young, Republican, Democrat, white, Latino. Yet blacks still overwhelmingly support him, even though they are among those who have lost the most since he was elected.

"We understand the difficulty of being a black man in his position, because of our close proximity to race and how it affects our lives, so we are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt," said Rodney Knott, who runs a fatherhood initiative and blogs on local issues. "Black folks are taking this personal because we identify with him so much. It's like somebody in our family. I can talk about them, but you better not."

Airick Leonard West, who heads the Kansas City School Board, agrees. "Maybe other people thought he had a magic wand and went to Hogwarts and thought, 'Oh, he's black so he's going to help all the black people,' " he said. "If that's what you're looking for, that ain't coming."

The political potential to be found in devotion this deep is very much on the minds of a president and a Democratic Party anxious about losing control of the House or Senate in the fall. When Obama administration and Democratic officials travel here this week to address the annual convention of the NAACP, they will be looking for ways to turn black enthusiasm for the president into votes for his party.

That is no simple thing. The loyalty many blacks feel to Obama does not always spill over to other Democratic candidates.

Take Missouri, where blacks make up about 12 percent of the population. Obama narrowly lost the state in 2008, although blacks turned out in record numbers. This year, Missouri's secretary of state, Democrat Robin Carnahan, is running to replace retiring Republican Sen. Christopher S. Bond. Carnahan is unlikely to win, however, unless black voters once again rush out to the polls. Without Obama on the ballot, Democratic strategists are having a difficult time generating much interest among blacks. Last week, the president held a rally for Carnahan and attended a fundraiser for her campaign. But in conversations with several African Americans here, support for Carnahan seemed lukewarm at best.

"I am just starting to tune in" to the campaign, said Jamekia Kendrix, 31, who has seen several homes foreclosed on her block. She had more to say about Obama. She said she voted for him and still strongly supports him, though she wishes he would spend more on education and reviving the economy and less on war. "He is doing the best he can," she said. "He's not always going to do what I think he should."

Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster, warned that not even politically engaged black voters like Kendrix are necessarily going to turn out for Democrats in the fall. "These are Obama voters. These are not Democratic voters," he said. "They are leaning toward Democrats in their views, but these surge voters are not a part of the traditional Democratic voting bloc. That's the big X factor here. We can't turn surge voters out by two weeks of black radio."

To that end, the Democratic National Committee has launched a $50 million nationwide effort to try to lure these "surge voters" back to the polls in November.