Obama's Pogo Presidency

That was sound advice from a man who conspicuously knows a few things about good political strategy -- I particularly liked the understated "probably not" part -- yet Obama withheld it until the final phrase of his final answer to NBC's Chip Reid's follow-up question about "the state of the Republican Party."

It was as though the president was thinking: This is so bloody evident, I can't believe I'm having to say it; but there, there you go -- satisfied?

Otherwise he was much more delicate, talking and hinting around the issue of the GOP's terminal dunderheadedness. His enchanting response, in part, to Jeff Zeleny's enchanting question was typical: "[T]here is still a certain quotient of political posturing and bickering," or so Obama singled out as to what "troubles" or sobers him, "that takes place even when we're in the middle of really big crises."

That, of course, is Obama's political posture -- a denial of self-posturing -- and he's able to so breezily and convincingly sell it because by comparison the opposition's posture, as it were, is more of an adolescent slouch.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, while first hastening to emphasize that this takes absolutely nothing away from his own sovereign skills as a pol: Barack Obama has always been supremely lucky in his enemies.

You'll recall he made it to the U.S. Senate largely because his Republican opponent was more of a frenzied, deranged ideation than an actual opponent: Alan Keyes. He quickly moved on to toppling the fearsome Clinton machine, but principally because of the Clinton machine's own almost breathtakingly clueless miscalculations. From there he was blessed by, let's say, the imperfect competence of default candidates: the gaffe-inclined John McCain and his pixilated sidekick, Sarah Palin, both of whom were incidentally preceded and defined in political reputation by American history's worst president ever, hands down.

David Axelrod in his most fanciful dreams could not have ordered up a more appealing enemies list. Near every rung of Obama's political ladder there has hovered some blissful deus ex machina, whether in the form of his opponents' certifiable madness or astonishing missteps, or merely in the timely culmination of eight years of criminal negligence.

Now, 100 days into his own administration, his unparalleled luck continues. It was, for instance, surely the political gods who arranged for the likes of a Michele Bachmann's reelection. Her latest:

"I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president, Jimmy Carter. And I’m not blaming this on President Obama. I just think it's an interesting coincidence."

You can't buy publicity like that. You can't, to return to Axelrod's fanciful dreams, even order it up regardless of cost, because it's politically priceless.

It goes without saying that Ms. Bachmann is hardly some GOP powerhouse who speaks for the party. But it also goes without saying that Ms. Bachmann is, in fact, a GOP powerhouse who speaks for the party.

Because just as it was once the economy, stupid, it's always who and what makes the news that counts. And since she's the bubbly cream of the GOP's most dreadful crop ever, Ms. Bachmann is what makes the news. Hence to millions she is indeed the voice, the face, the unhinged Ideal of modern Republicanism.

It's got so bad, the DCCC now has a Web site of whimsical warning devoted entirely to Ms. Bachmann and her philosophical musings. New York's Mary is at risk of losing her distinctive historical epithet to Minnesota's Typhoid Michele.

All of which is only one way of saying that the GOP's "desperate straits" are presently far beyond the mere public-relations drawback of being the "Party of no." Instead, it's the party of self-induced jokes -- the party of ridicule, a party so ridiculous Barack Obama needs not even point it out. Everyone already gets it.

Next, however, comes this Democratic president's real enemy -- his most formidable yet -- the one from Walt Kelly's penetrating imagination: "We have met the enemy and he is us."