Obama sets about limiting the debt debate’s political damage (VIDEO)

President Barack Obama headed to his hometown Chicago to restart fund raising after weeks of intense wrangling over the nation’s debt ceiling that has by most accounts left him badly damaged politically and cost millions in lost campaign funding.  

AFP reports that the compromise debt deal reached Monday between Obama and lawmakers on Capitol Hill may have averted a U.S. default but "was scored as a defeat for the White House" and badly weakened Obama's "political brand and presidential heft."

The bill hammered out over the weekend, approved by the Senate in a 74-26 vote Tuesday and signed by Obama hours later, "postpones the thorniest fiscal dilemmas for later this year when the 2012 election campaign will intensify," the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

A panel of lawmakers must push through a $1.5 trillion debt-reduction package by year's end — or risk automatic spending cuts across the government, including defense and Medicare.

The LA Times writes that Obama emerged from the debt talks "in a weakened political position with limited influence over a divided Congress."

The debate also did nothing to help Obama clear his biggest hurdle to re-election — the country's 9.2 percent jobless rate, Reuters writes, adding that: "In fact, it ratcheted up the bar by generating so much uncertainty that businesses sharply cut back investing and hiring."

"While Washington has been absorbed in this debate about deficits, people across the country are asking what we can do to help the father looking for work," Obama said on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Obama is suffering record low approval ratings and must contend with a stock market slump, new signs of economic stagnation and a Congress hostile to his job creation plans, AFP reports.

All that adds to his increasingly complicated bid for reelection next year.

His reelection campaign expects to raise tens of millions of dollars less this summer than it did in the spring, after Obama canceled several fund-raisers because of debt limit negotiations, the Chicago Sun Times reports.

Obama campaign staffers say 10 fund-raisers involving the president, Vice President Joe Biden or White House chief of staff Bill Daley were canceled or postponed 10 fund-raisers because of the the debt talks.

Aides also said that Obama would also embark on a bus tour through Midwestern states riddled with unemployment later this month.