Opinion: Chicago’s president needles Washington over winter’s cold

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Although Barack Obama is supposed to have been living in Washington these last four years as a U.S. senator from Illinois, he played the neophyte newcomer today at the start of a presidential meeting with business people on -- what else? -- the economy.

While the cameras were present, the new White House resident took the floor to get off a good-natured needling about, well, how sissy the nation’s capital is to close its schools -- at least his daughters’ private school -- just because of a little old cold and ice. Washingtonians don’t seem able to handle meteorlogical adversity, said the Hawaiian native most recently of the Windy City.

Obama, who’s taken to quoting his daughters’ quips in recent days, said they’d noted that in Chicago no snow cancels school and they still have recess in the cold.

Obama proposed that he’d have to teach residents of the District of Columbia ‘some flinty Chicago toughness.’ All part of the change he hopes to import there. (See video below.)

What made his comments about the cold extra chilling was they came on the same day that former Vice President Al Gore gave more congressional testimony on the growing specter of global warming.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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