And then the monthly US employment report appeared on Friday.

The report contained good news for Obama — private employers stepped up hiring. April saw an additional 244,000 nonfarm jobs, more than in any of the previous 11 months.

But it also contained bad news — unemployment rose too. The survey of households showed a sharp decline in employment and only a modest rise in the labor force. The monthly jobless rate rose to 9.0 percent, up from 8.8 percent in March.

For Obama, whose biggest challenge to winning re-election next year will be the stuttering US economy, the gains in employment over the past seven months remain too meager to make much of a dent in the pool of 13.7 million Americans who are out of work.

“We need to be creating something upward of 300,000 more jobs to really get that unemployment rate down,” said Heather Boushey, senior economist at the progressive Center for American Progress.

“If we don’t see a change in policy, I fear that we’re going to be stuck in this pattern of too-tepid employment growth for quite some time to come,” she said.

The mixed economic report put a damper on a string of positives for the White House that started late Sunday with Obama’s announcement that a US military commando team had killed Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan.

Another of the administration’s stubborn challenges also seemed to ease in the week when oil futures fell, taking oil below $100 a barrel and raising hopes for a decrease in the relatively high gasoline prices that have angered car-loving Americans.

On Thursday night, a handful of little-known Republican presidential candidates touted their conservative credentials and slammed Obama’s policies in the first debate of the 2012 White House campaign.

Most high-profile Republican contenders skipped the event, giving evidence of the slow-starting and unsettled nature of the party’s effort to find a candidate to face an incumbent who hopes to raise $1 billion, and whose approval ratings leaped to well above 50 percent this week.

“There’s few things that can top capturing and then killing Osama Bin Laden. It was the kind of mission that defied what his (Obama’s) critics said about him and it was an important piece of the national security challenge that this country has been struggling with since 9/11,” said Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University.

“Overall, it was a good week ... but underlying that good week was the rise of unemployment to 9 percent. That’s a bad number even with the jobs increasing,” he said.

Analysts also pointed to the disappointing increase of only 1.8 percent in US Gross Domestic Product for the first quarter announced last week. This was a disturbing reminder of the challenges faced by Obama — and both Democrats and Republicans in Congress — in cutting the budget deficit and also restoring economic and jobs growth.

Republican consultant Matt MacDonald said companies are playing it safe because both the jobs outlook and expectations for the overall economy are uncertain.

“No one wants to be going out and hiring tens of thousands of people on the assumption that there is a robust economic boom around the corner,” said McDonald, a Republican policy and communications consultant at Hamilton Place Strategies in Washington.

He said the household survey showed the number of jobs actually dropped to 190,000, well short of the 189,000 jobs he calculated Obama needed to be on track to reach 8 percent unemployment before Election Day, Nov. 6, 2012.

“That this was a very mixed jobs reports for the president points to challenges he’s going to face on the economy going forward,” McDonald said.