John Batchelor:Republicans Smell Weakness In Obama

......Asked about the president’s soaring approval ratings, the senior Republican said, “Yeah, he’s really popular, like in the '70s, but it’s his personal approval rating. On his handling of the economy, he’s down around 60 and sinking. That’s why we won’t attack him. We praise him. Bipartisan this and that, bipartisan anything. Go to the meetings, listen closely, shake hands. The president is a star. His financial team isn’t. And he knows it. When he protested that his stimulus bill was going to create all these green jobs, he was told back, what’s that do for a machinist in the UAW who just got his job yanked? And the president smiled and laughed sympathetically and said, ‘I was just joking with you.’”

I reminded my source that once upon a time in the Great Depression, during the very month of March of FDR’s inauguration in 1933, Hollywood produced a wonderful fairy tale called Gabriel Over the White House, in which a pleasant, back-slapping, nonconfrontational President Jasper Hammond, played by the vivacious Walter Huston, piles up his car in a joy ride, and while recovering from the accident is visited by the Archangel Gabriel, who inspires the president to lead without fear. The reawakened Jasper Hammond fires the hack Cabinet, discards Congress and the courts, and assumes dictatorial powers to confront a million-man unemployed army march on the Capitol, face down machine-gun-toting gangsters who attack the White House, and challenge the war-mongering nations who owe the US war debts. He is a wunderkind on the new medium of the national radio broadcast, and the people are inspired by him so much they regain their pride and promise.

“No, no, no, that ain’t Obama,” said my best GOP House source. “Inspiration is not what you hear from the president. The one thing that comes across from being in the chamber with him is, that the thing you felt with Clinton, it’s not there, there’s no magic. The Democrats don’t feel it and we sure don’t. The president didn’t earn what he’s got, and no one’s afraid of him… Dictatorial power? Fascist. That’ll be the day. No one's worried about what he’s going to do. People applaud. What’s it mean? ”