Yesterday, former governor Ed Rendell, in all his inimitable, savage affability, repeated an oft-heard sentiment:
The president's going to be in great shape — I think this Republican primary season has been a godsend ... The Republican race for president, so far, has resembled a clown show.
No doubt about that. Indeed, before long, the cliche might flip. Really funny Big Tent clown shows will be said to resemble a Republican race for president. The currently running one is so marvelously bad, so splendidly painful, so hilariously depressing it's setting new lows for groveling politics and new highs for slapstick comedy.
It's true as well that this primary season has been a "godsend" for President Obama. Until the look-alike clowns sprang from their plastic car in fright wigs and floppy shoes, the gathering consensus was that the president was in immense political trouble. I myself subscribed not to this Doomsday issue, nonetheless its theme permeated virtually every political conversation: Election Day will be a squeaker; advantage, Obama's opponent. That cliche, too, is now flipping.
I would, however, quibble with the epithet "godsend," in that it conveys an otherworldly sense of blind luck on Obama's part. To a nearly dismissible extent, this also is true. Yes, he's been lucky in drawing an unprecedented goofiness from among the available cast of clowns. Yet we mustn't neglect the far more significant premise that President Obama is facing this particular batch of clowns largely because the GOP's powerhouses (Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, Haley Barbour -- once) stopped before starting. They surveyed their 2012 prospects against an admittedly beleaguered but vastly popular president, and said No thanks; they appreciated long ago that unseating Obama would essentially be an impossible task.
And that fatalistic appreciation wasn't generated by Obama's "luck." In the president they recognized the administration's accumulated -- and accumulating -- hard-fought successes, which the cranky, incorrigible GOP, to its credibility detriment, insists on either maliciously denying or adolescently disparaging in toto.
In short, the Wise Idlers appreciated that November, 2012 would look much better to the electorate than did November, 2011, just as 2011 looked better than 2010. And all that hasn't come about through presidential luck.