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Opinion: Poor Obama confronts a grueling day today

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To hear President Obama tell it, he’s a sad fellow these days.

The problem, it seems, is that he’s president of the United States. ‘I miss being anonymous,’ the melancholy man moaned to a few White House visitors the other day.

Some Americans agree; they miss this Chicago pol being anonymous too.

The poor man, who turns 50 this summer, does live with his mother-in-law. But he said he especially misses Saturday mornings -- ‘rolling out of bed, not shaving, getting into my car with my girls, driving to the supermarket, squeezing the fruit, getting my car washed.”

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Instead, Obama must endure 24-hour free room service, servants, drivers, a giant....

...helicopter, world travel, fawning celebrities, never gasping at a whirling gas pump and getting a salary that many of America’s unemployed millions would take a tiny fraction of if they could. “I can’t take a walk,’ whined the most powerful person in the world, who spent $745 million of other people’s money to get into that White House detention center.

As a sign of his sincere sadness, Obama will ride his presidential 747 with the bedroom and shower to Chicago today.

And there in a desperate bid for privacy Obama will attend and speak at not one, not two, but three political fundraisers for his Democratic National Committee. Including one in the stylish Grand Ballroom out on Navy Pier.

This is the big bucks kickoff for what Obama aides gleefully predict will be a $1 billion political extravaganza of ‘Vote for me.’

A billion bucks. Think, a president once suggested, what that kind of money could do for the most vulnerable members of our society.

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But it’s more important right now that sum goes to people like television station owners for the broadcast and cable time to convince Americans over the remaining 572 days that they should disregard Obama’s profound desire to return to private life in that faux Hyde Park.

And instead those Americans should voluntarily opt to keep the poor guy locked up for four more years in the Churchill bust-less Oval Office with VP X.

Some people might suspect that 81 weeks of campaigning could be somewhat more than sufficient for U.S. voters to come to know better the man and the record they’ve been living with now as a regular visitor in their lives for more than four years.

But suspecting that would reveal those people don’t understand there are really two parallel elections underway already these days. And neither involves Republicans.

One race is for the votes to be counted on Nov. 6, 2012. And one race is for the Democrat’s dollar votes to be tallied after June 30 this year.

Obama bundlers are under enormous pressure to make the first campaign quarter’s numbers overwhelming in size. $200 million? How about a nice round quarter-billion?

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Not as a sign of obviously overpowering American excess. But as a potential counter to the puny poll numbers their man has earned in his first 814 days of imprisonment.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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