President Barack Obama has had a tough time of it in recent weeks. Did the trouble start when he was trying to honor a Polish American and made a reference to Polish concentration camps,” or was that much ado about nothing? When I first read about this, I dismissed it, thinking that he obviously meant Nazi concentration camps in Poland and everybody knows that. I didn’t know until later that this phrase is deeply offensive to the people of Poland. They were victims of the Nazis, not collaborators, and they don’t want anybody thinking otherwise.
It’s a good thing that Obama isn’t running for President of Poland.
Did his trouble start when Democrats lost in their efforts to recall the Republican governor of Wisconsin? For months this had been a national media story. Wisconsin has been reliably Democrat for years, and people were saying that the budget debates there mirrored the economic debate nationally. And the governor won this time by a larger margin than he had in 2010.
It’s a good thing that Obama isn’t running for Governor of Wisconsin.
Team Obama is trying to make the argument that the President has done a good job, and things would be even better if Republicans in Congress were not mindlessly trying to thwart him at every turn. Interesting argument, and a familiar one. The first George Bush tried to make the same case against a stronger margin of congressional Democrats in 1992. The voters didn’t buy it, and Bush went down hard.
It’s a good thing that Obama isn’t running as a Republican for President in 1992.
Our current President likes to talk a lot about Ronald Reagan. That President won re-election by taking 49 out of 50 states. Reagan had to deal with the Cold War and claims that AIDS was going to become a pandemic. For Barack Obama, unemployment was up in May, but gas is down in June (relatively speaking). Iran is quiet for now, but still potentially dangerous.
It’s a good thing that Obama isn’t running for President against Ronald Reagan.