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The Obama campaign team has been preparing to face Mitt Romney in a general election for the better part of a year, and Romney's narrow triumph in Iowa and decisive follow-up victory in New Hampshire merely served to bless that battle plan. The campaign believes it has to be armed for Obama vs. Romney, the president vs. "the jobs killer."

It may take a while for Romney to lock down the title "nominee," but the president's re-election team has trained its weaponry on the former Massachusetts governor almost to the exclusion of any other contender.

In Obama’s world, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and the others in the GOP field are discussed much like brawlers in a bar before a prize fighter saunters in to land a punch. Every attack ad aimed at Romney and funded by Romney’s primary opponents benefits Barack Obama, goes the thinking.

“They have thought this through and they identified Romney early on as the almost-certain Republican nominee,” Bob Shrum, a veteran of Democratic presidential campaigns, said about the Obama campaign team. “A lot of the preliminary work is being done for them now by Romney’s Republican opponents,” he added in an interview with RCP.

Democrats who say they worry that a weak and unpredictable economy could be Obama’s undoing in November look to 2008 for reassurances that the president and his team are ready. “Methodical” is a word supporters use to describe Obama’s campaign organization, meaning controlled, thorough, steady, relentless, data-driven. That methodical approach comforts Democrats who know about losing presidential races and the risks and rewards of running during times of economic uncertainty.

“What I learned having worked against the Obama campaign, and then having worked with the Obama campaign is that they are prepared for just about anything that can and will happen,” said Patti Solis Doyle, who managed Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign until after Super Tuesday in 2008, a period during which Obama steamed past the New York senator on his way to the nomination.

The Obama campaign has diagramed for the media, campaign volunteers and prospective donors how the president can win, and why the campaign sees Romney as a flawed candidate based on his life story and persona, his policy prescriptions, particularly on the economy, and his record of flip-flopping on public policy issues.

The morning after Romney won the Iowa caucuses by eight votes, David Axelrod, the Obama campaign’s senior adviser and message manager, treated Romney as a winner and a loser -- the eventual nominee, and a candidate too weak to defeat the president. He called Romney a “charlatan” who unsettled even GOP voters because he was perceived by some as an unreliable conservative. To Axelrod, the rest of the Republican field was noise.

“Romney has positions on every issue -- and usually several -- and that has created a great deal of anxiety,” Axelrod told reporters. “There is this real sense that people don’t know where Romney stands today, or will stand tomorrow,” he said, repeating the Democrats’ chief assault against the front-runner.