While polls show Obama’s new populist push is resonating with voters, that has yet to translate to personal popularity in these two key battleground states, with the president languishing in the low 40s — so some local pols are keeping their distance.

Obama isn’t the hot ticket he used to be — a fall 2008 end-of-campaign rally in northern Virginia drew more than 80,000 screaming admirers — but he’s no pariah, either.

On Monday, a Richmond Times-Dispatch poll found Obama in an essentially dead heat with Mitt Romney and Rick Perry in the state. Obama aides took that as an encouraging sign, considering the sluggish economy and a still-powerful tea party movement in the southern and western parts of the state.

Despite Obama’s seven-point win here last time, his reception in Virginia on Tuesday had a very 50-50 feel. Outside South Boston just over the North Carolina border, three men stood on a truck bed as the black armored presidential motor coach buzzed by, holding up signs that read “Job?” and “liar.”

Nearby, a woman held a sign saying, “yes we can, Obama 2012,” and a bowling alley in the area offered a “presidents bowl free” special.

Near Clarksville, Va., in an area dotted with tobacco fields, a woman stood in her front yard waving a large Confederate flag, according to a report from press traveling with the president.

In Emporia, a straddle-the-tracks town off I-95 in extreme south central Virginia, hundreds of admirers, most of them African-American, stood in the sun for hours to hear Obama speak at Greensville County High School.

Earlier, the president met with teachers in Jamestown, N.C., to hammer home his call for Republicans either to pass his $447 billion jobs bill in bite-sized pieces, or explain layoffs to their angry constituents.

“I hope that members of Congress are going to be doing a little bit of listening to teachers and educators,” told a roundtable of Carolina teachers Tuesday morning. “We have a tendency to say great things about how important education is in the abstract, but we don’t always put our money where our mouth is. And it’s absolutely critical right now to make sure that we don’t see the kinds of cutbacks that we’ve been seeing. If that becomes a long-term trend we’re going to fall behind countries like China, Korea, Germany.”

If Obama’s bus was fueled by the jobs push, it’s destination was unmistakably political, aiming to win back blacks, liberals and independents needed to secure a second term. On Wednesday he’ll court a third key constituency — the Commonwealth’s 700,000 veterans — during a trip to Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, where first lady Michelle Obama will unveil a new private partnership to retrain returning Iraq and Afghanistan soldiers.