Lupica really nailed it today.

President Obama needs to get America out of economic mess before Republicans get him

Mike Lupica, NY Daily News

Sometimes you think that Barack Obama's job has been Candidate in Chief, as if he went straight from the last campaign to this one, never stopping in between to actually be President of the United States. It is one of the reasons why he is in the trouble he is in, and not only because of an economy that has gotten worse on his watch.

But there is another problem for Obama, even if you are one of the people who believes he was and is a much better candidate than he has been a President, the way Jimmy Carter was:

Obama is a reasonable man in an increasingly toxic and unreasonable political world, where the only plan from the other side, from the time he got into office, has been to get him out of office. Mitch McConnell said it early for the Republicans, and nothing has changed since.

"The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term President," McConnell said.

Not fix the economy, or health care, or Iraq. Fix this guy in the White House, but good.

It is why Obama better step it up now if he wants to keep his job. That doesn't mean he has to go at his opponents the way they go at him, in Congress, on cable America, in the radio world of the Limbaughs, and with anybody else with the crackpot idea that this President has some anti-American agenda.

But one of these days he needs to come hard at the people constantly coming at him, and not merely with a jobs plan that sounds more like the first draft of one. Really the President needs to say this about his opponents, and without TelePrompTing:

"They would rather beat me than help you."

He has no chance of saving himself with a jobs plan that sounds like some kind of slapped-together first draft. But what he needs to sell is something that will work, and that means the new tax he is expected to propose this morning - what is being called the Warren Buffett Rule - on people in this country making more than a million dollars a year.

Unless you think that spending cuts alone are going to get America out of the fix it is in. Unless you now think it is now against the law in America for the rich to pay their true fair share.

Obama is jumped for this tax plan before it is even formally announced, of course. As if the idea of added taxes for the rich make him even more of an enemy of the state than he already is. But that is the reality of Obama's situation. He is up against people who think their job is to make sure he loses his. No matter what the cost.

"A political move," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) says on CNN Sunday.

"Class warfare," Graham says.

Yeah, sure it is. When Ronald Reagan, now the patron saint of everything good and noble and right in America, raised taxes, people like Graham must have thought it was some sort of sacrament.

Bush and Cheney, who somehow still get treated as heroes, thought it was a sensational business practice to start wars without raising taxes, and would have brought back troops from Baghdad to protect the rich. It is absolutely one of the reasons we are where we are, and why Obama should have come forward with something like the Buffett Rule a long time ago, and not needed to use the old man from Omaha as cover. The idea that taxing the rich will further stagnate this economy has always been a lie, no matter who tells it, and no matter how often.

And by the way? None of this means Obama has been a great President, because he hasn't. Because the country has lost jobs on his watch, because there is more pessimism about the future in this country than at any other time in my lifetime, even with the young, even with all the first-time voters who bought into the soaring language and high ideas of Obama's campaign and helped elect him in the first place.

You want to go after this President on the way he handled health care, go ahead. Call him out on Israel this week when he gets to the United Nations, and his record on jobs, and the way he too often has seemed like speeches instead of solutions. Knock yourself out.

But the money he needs to get the country out of this has to come from somewhere. The President now tries to get it from people who can afford it. Before they get him.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics...l#ixzz1YPL1ZLtj