Given how the Republican candidates have performed on the campaign trail and the fact that the nation’s economy appears poised for a welcome recovery, President Obama’s re-election hopes may be improving. Lately, however, the president hit some substantial speed bumps in his bid to remain in the Oval Office for four more years.

First, he and his surrogates have been busy trying to persuade the American people that his decision to delay action on a controversial oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico was correct, for environmental reasons, even if it dashes dreams of the many new jobs associated with the project.

Then the administration declared that even Catholic-affiliated institutions — universities and hospitals, but not churches — are obliged to cover contraception in their health insurance plans, never mind the church’s long-standing opposition to the very notion of birth control.

This raised issues of religious freedom. Catholic bishops railed against the ruling from the moment Obama announced it, and they’ve been joined by politicians such as Mitt Romney, who — despite his poor showing in Tuesday’s voting — remains the presumptive Republican nominee for president.

“Such rules don’t belong in the America that I believe in,” he declared in an essay in The Washington Examiner. However, when Romney was the governor of Massachusetts, similar rules were in place there and he never made them a political issue, so there’s some suspicion that Romney is cynically seizing the opportunity to score points against Obama.

In fact, many Catholic institutions already operate in states that require such contraceptive coverage, including New York and California. Of the 28 states with such laws, only eight of them exempt Catholic hospitals and universities from the contraceptive coverage requirement. Also, surveys repeatedly show that a high percentage of Catholic women already use birth control, in defiance of their church’s teachings.

The third speed bump gives the Republicans an opening to depict the president as something of a hypocrite. That’s because when he delivered his State of the Union address two years ago, Obama famously looked directly at justices of the Supreme Court and told them they erred when they ruled in the case now known, in political shorthand, as Citizens United. Their ruling allows special interests to form political action committees that can spend without limits on election campaigns.

Obama explained then that “I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests. ... They should be decided by the American people.” But earlier this week the president, pressed by his political advisers, changed his mind and embraced the “super PAC” strategy for his own re-election campaign. Why? Surely it is because Obama’s side believes this may be the only way his campaign can compete with the billionaires backing whoever the Republican nominee may be.

“The announcement fully implicates the president, his campaign and his administration in the pollution of the political system unleashed by Citizens United and related court decisions,” The New York Times, a reliable supporter of most of Obama’s policies, observed.

The criticism is valid and the disappointment sincere, yet reality clearly is on the president’s side. If Republican candidates can rake in millions from wealthy supporters, why should the Democrats cling to a principle that, while admirable, may only doom them to failure at the polls?

And Obama’s change of mind could finally provide the long-awaited spark that leads to urgent changes in American election laws, changes that would render the Citizens United decision obsolete. That would be a welcome consequence of the president’s otherwise discouraging decision.