Now that Obama’s first 100 days are behind him, he can get back to enjoying the plagues that have been visited upon his administration. It’s always fun to hear what’s left of the GOP talk about his decisive victory of 100+ days ago as if he really got the breaks when the economy started to tank. (I hear the voice of Napoleon Dynamite: “Lucky!”)

“The typical president,” the president said, has “two or three big problems. We’ve got seven or eight big problems.” I don’t know if he was including Pakistan on that list, or today’s GM crisis, or the rearming of North Korea — hey, I said seven or eight! Who slipped me the combo pack when I wasn’t looking?  When asked later about what conservatives see as his latent socialism and the government’s involvement in the private sector, he returned to the shit-sandwich theme:

“If you could tell me right now that, when I walked into this office that the banks were humming, that autos were selling, and that all you had to worry about was Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, getting health care passed, figuring out how to deal with energy independence, deal with Iran, and a pandemic flu, I would take that deal,” he said. But Obama hasn’t had the luxury of choosing his challenges. They have assembled at his door, and ours, like a Moroccan line, each trying to push to the window first. 

With the announcement that Arlen Spector had crossed over to our side, the president could afford to be a little less magnanimous toward the Republicans. It wasn’t quite George Bush style with-us-or-against-us, but with the prospect of a filibuster-proof Democratic majority looming in the senate, he could drop the Mr.-Nice-Guy routine. 

And about time! With the news of Jack Kemp’s death we are reminded of that dying breed — the moderate Republican — at a time when the dinosaurs of the party have retrenched in their future tar-pits to stand up for their principles (ie, the fiscal discipline the forgot under GWB). Kemp’s conservative bonafides were unassailable, as a tax-cut evangelist, but late in his life he saw that the GOP was losing the minority vote (and hence the future). 

Not that the future, with all its complications, is something the Republicans seem eager to embrace. I get the feeling they are just hoping if they don’t evolve, the clock will turn back and it will be the fifties again. You know, soda shops and segregation. A simpler world.