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Opinion: More good news for Sarah Palin: President Obama doesn’t even think about her

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Will the good news never end for Sarah Palin?

Fans are lining up in the cold 24 hours in advance to buy her new book during the 16-city promotion tour for ‘America by Heart.’ ‘This lady will be the next president of the United States of America,’ said an enthused Brian Roper in Tulsa.

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She’s got a hit cable TV show. Polls of Republicans show the former Alaska governor is currently a most popular candidate for the party’s 2012 presidential nomination.

And now, believe it or not, even President Obama has an encouraging word for her. The Democrat tells ABC’s Barbara Walters that he’s not paying attention to his possible White House competitor.

‘I don’t think about Sarah Palin,’ the president said with a chuckle.

This fits the Obama pattern. In 2009, when virtually every poll showed Americans’ top....

...concerns were jobs and the economy, Obama was thinking more about getting his beloved healthcare legislation passed by his party’s large congressional majorities. That strategy succeeded. Obama told Walters in passing, ‘If I falter and the American people are dissatisfied, then I’ll have problems.’ As if he didn’t already.

When his attention did focus on the economy this fall, Obama and his campaign co-forecaster, Joe Biden, both said they weren’t thinking of Democrats losing control of either house of Congress.

However, on Nov. 2, in the biggest swing of seats since 1938 even before Biden was born, voters replaced 63 Obama-supporting House Democrats with Republicans, awarding the GOP control of the chamber where all financial legislation originates.

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In the same ABC interview Michelle Obama explained:

‘My understanding is that, number one, every president in history has lost Congress at the midterms. Maybe that’s overstating it, but it’s happened for every president in my lifetime.’

Actually, neither statement is accurate. George W. Bush’s party gained congressional seats in his first midterm in 2002, as did Franklin D. Roosevelt 68 years previously.

Obama has analyzed the midterm results as showing that his agenda was fine. It’s just that he had paid insufficient attention to communicating his goals to the American public.

As one result, a recent Battleground Poll revealed that a diminished minority of Americans (38%) were thinking of Obama as deserving a second term and a growing majority (57%) were thinking of voting for someone else.

A more recent Zogby Poll discovered Obama’s job approval had slid below 40% for the first time (39%), the lowest of his half-finished presidency.

Of course, every president says he’s way too busy to think about politics or polls or the next election; Obama’s been to Ohio 12 times probably because he’s a huge Ohio State fan. And every president is so intently focused only on the current job and responsibilities and improving the life of every American across this grand land, perhaps by fixing the mistakes of the past, and looking optimistically toward the promising future for our children and yada-yada-yada.

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Palin should only hope Obama was telling the truth about his inattentiveness to her activities. That would be repeating the same mistake some of Obama’s Democrat competitors made back in 2006-07.

They thought that an inexperienced elected state official who’d quit that job to run for higher office, who could give a real good speech but had zero foreign policy experience and who had only written a couple of best-selling books, could not possibly present a serious political challenge to established Washington veterans.

And we all know now how accurate that thinking was.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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