By Jeffrey Page
President Obama was in Chicago for his birthday celebration and of course made some remarks to a friendly hometown crowd. Some parts of his appearance made me yearn for the days of the 1980 campaign when Ted Kennedy challenged Jimmy Carter – the incumbent – for the nomination.

Because, surely I’m not the only one having nightmares about such expressions as “President Perry” and “President Bachmann.”

No one takes on an incumbent of his own party, right? But Kennedy, sensing weakness and opportunity, announced, and it quickly got ugly. “If he runs, I’ll whip his ass,” Carter said. No one believed he could do it. After all, there Jimmy Carter was sitting in the White House, wearing his cardigan and informing us of the malaise he decided had overtaken us. He had a 28 percent approval rating, an average national misery index (sum of unemployment and inflation rates) of a nasty 16.26, the U.S. embassy in Tehran packed with 52 American hostages, and a failed attempt to rescue them.

But he swept Kennedy – who didn’t help his own cause when he stumbled on the question of why he wanted to be president – in the early Iowa caucuses by a margin of about 2-1 never even mentioning Chappaquiddick. And Ted was done.

So was Carter. Sure, he whipped Kennedy, which everybody sort of knew he would. And then of course Ronald Reagan whipped Carter. Everybody sort of knew that was going to happen, too.

Hence a question: Is there someone among the Democrats this year who’s going to challenge President Obama and thus maybe prevent the advent of a President Perry or a President Bachmann?

President Obama says he wants to work with the GOP opposition. It seems everybody but the president understands that the Republicans don’t want to work with him; they want his head. They don’t want to be his friend or work partner. Why doesn’t President Obama understand this? Has he forgotten a telling comment by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell? “The single most important thing we [Republicans] want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” McConnell said last year. Read it again: The single most important thing.

You have to give McConnell credit. He doesn’t obfuscate. But why is it that I understand this and President Obama does not? He keeps talking like there’s a chance the Republicans will see the light and work with him. They will do no such thing. When they got together to work on a deficit compromise, the GOP made sure that not an extra nickel would be extracted from millionaire taxpayers. Obama? He got a nice birthday card.

Parts of the birthday trip to Chicago were wrong as wrong can be.

Will someone inform the president that when he uses a teleprompter at an informal event – a birthday bash, for crying out loud – he not only looks ridiculous but plays right into the hands of the Limbaugh crowd, who’ve been mocking his use of teleprompters since Day One.

One of Obama’s quotes at his Chicago party gave the Republicans a great sound bite. Doubtless you will see the following in GOP campaign commercials next year. It’s President Obama speaking in Chicago about the night of his election: “And we knew the road ahead was going to be difficult, that the climb was going to be steep. I have to admit I didn’t know how steep the climb was going to be.”

Didn’t know?

He didn’t know that the climb involved the 4,189 U.S. service personnel killed in Iraq up to two years ago, another 1,049 in Afghanistan?

He didn’t know the climb involved the loss of 2.6 million jobs in 2008 alone?

He didn’t know the climb involved an unemployment rate hovering in the neighborhood of 7 percent, the highest since 1993?

Well, he should have known. And if he didn’t know in 2008, he shouldn’t have mentioned his ignorance in 2011.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

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