Rising gasoline prices and their potential to hurt President Obama's re-election chances have gotten recurrent journalistic attention during his presidency.

Recent stories in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, for instance, report that officials in Obama's re-election and White House are nervously eying the rise in gas prices because of its potential to slow the economy, hurt the recovery and make more difficult the president's argument that the economic situation is slowly but surely improving.

Meanwhile, the same higher gas prices give Republicans another angle of attack against Obama. They blame his energy policies — such as his decision to block the Canadian Keystone XL pipeline project and his renewable-energy push generally — for the higher prices though experts tend to blame Iranian threats to the global oil supply and other world news for the upward pressure on crude oil prices.