Obama, a "bitter clinger."

Roger Simon asks if Obama should resign or, like LBJ, refuse to run for a second term.

Nevertheless, Obama is ensuring his own failure. Should he resign? If you were a Democrat, you might want that, even with daffy Joe Biden waiting in the wings. Better yet, you would want Obama, in the grand tradition of LBJ, to decline a second term. No such luck. The man is evidently an (increasingly) bitter clinger, as he indicated at a Chicago fundraiser on Wednesday night: 

It’s been a long, tough journey. But we have made some incredible strides together. Yes, we have. But the thing that we all ought to remember is that as much as good as we have done, precisely because the challenges were so daunting, precisely because we we were inheriting so many challenges, that we’re not even halfway there yet. When I said ‘change we can believe in’ I didn’t say ‘change we can believe in tomorrow.’ Not change we can believe in next week. We knew this was going to take time because we’ve got this big, messy, tough democracy. 

It’s been a long, tough journey all right — something like having root canal work that never ends and without anesthesia. I don’t know what “incredible strides” Obama is referring to. Perhaps his heath care legislation whose contents are a greater mystery than the meat they used to serve in my freshman dormitory. Or maybe he’s referring to the assassination of Bin Laden, an act any American president — in fact, any reasonably patriotic American citizen — would have ratified in an instant for fear of impeachment if he did otherwise.


No wonder he is still clinging (that word again) to the preternaturally vague rhetoric of “change you can believe in.”