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Opinion: Barack Obama admits thinking like a Republican on some days, at least about leaving after one term

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Some surprisingly good news for the assembling posse of Republicans angling for the White House:

Barack Obama says he’s good with their idea of him serving only one term.

The Democrat admitted to NBC’s Ann Curry that some times are more difficult than others in the Oval Office.’There are days where I say that one term is enough,’ the aging president said in an interview broadcast the morning after the first GOP debate in New Hampshire.

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Obama added:

Michelle and the kids are wonderful in that if I said, ‘You know, guys, I want to do something different,’ they’d be fine. They’re not invested in daddy being president or my husband being president.

Neither, it seems, is the growing field of Republican challengers and millions of Americans expressing increased disapproval of Obama’s job performance. According to Gallup, this president’s average approval in 2011 so far is 46%, down from last year’s 47.3%.

In the week ending June 12, Obama’s job approval was 46%, down from 50% the previous week, while his disapproval was 44%, up from 42%.

Dissatisfaction with his job on the economy seems especially high with nearly two-out-of-three disapproving. It must have something to do with gas prices being up 104% since he became president, the national debt growing by 35% to $14.3 trillion and unemployment jumping from 7.3% on his Inauguration Day to 9.1% lately.

Coincidentally, in the same time period Obama’s approval has tumbled from 69%.

However, Obama’s one-term thinking is just TV talk. While seven debating Republicans were trying to finish a complete sentence or two between John King’s interruptions on CNN Monday evening, Obama was doing three fundraisers in Miami , with another offshore Tuesday in Puerto Rico.

At the same time Michelle Obama seems pretty invested in her husband’s reelection, doing a string of her own political money harvests on the West Coast.

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Obama, who turns a half-century old this summer, added in his NBC interview that what keeps him going on tough days is thinking of all the many things he still wants to do on education and energy. And, no doubt, the fact that there’s still a few hundred billion dollars he has yet to spend.

The president has shared some other notable ruminations. At one of those Florida funders, Obama made yet another of his promises. He vowed that 2012 will be the last time Americans see his name on a ballot.

And he claimed: ‘Frankly, Michelle would have been happy if I had just kept on teaching and writing books.’

In recent days, Obama was also forced to step into the distracting mess surrounding the married New York Rep. Anthony Weiner, who has admitted talking and texting dirty with a half dozen women around the country and generously sharing cellphone photographs of himself snapped in unusual places.

Curry asked the president about that fellow Democrat. And Obama said if he was in Weiner’s towel, he would resign.

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