LIMA, Ohio - With four days to go until the election, President Obama has never been more fired up, according to senior campaign strategist David Axelrod.

"I've known him for 20 years… I've never seen him more exhilarated than he is right now," he told reporters traveling with the president in Ohio today. "He believes in what he's doing. He believes in what he's fighting for."

"You can see in the speech he's delivering… that this is coming from his loins," he said, adding, "I just wanted to say 'loins.' I wanted to see if I could get 'loins' in the story."

(He's succeeded.)

The president spent the day laying out his closing argument at three stops in this key battleground state, where he is leading in most polls. "We always said this was going to be a close state," Axelrod said. "Virtually every poll we've seen in the last week shows the president in the lead. So we anticipate it's going to be a hard-fought close race, but we're going to win that race."

The Obama campaign feels the president's position in the Buckeye State has been strengthened by GOP nominee Mitt Romney's misleading ads that suggest automakers GM and Chrysler could be moving jobs out of Ohio to China.

"I think that they have created a huge gulf of trust with the voters of Ohio," Axelrod said.

"It's been a disaster for them this week," senior advisor David Plouffe said. "To have this atmospheric in the close in Ohio as those few remaining undecideds are making their decision, this ad, the auto industry issue again being the paramount issue in Ohio, we think [Romney's] Election Day job just got appreciably more difficult."