Craig Crawford: Obama Looked "Pained" During Last Week's Speech

Imus apologized getting Craig Crawford later than expected. "I just can't control myself," he said. "We get to talking about stuff, and then we get to laughing."

Less funny, at least to President Obama, is his approval rating, which, at 47 percent, is the lowest for any President in history at this point in their term.

"We live in an age where people vote for people they don't approve of," said Crawford, who whose Trail Mix blog appears on CQPolitics.com. He's been reading excerpts of Sarah Palin's book Going Rogue, and it's making him grumpy.

"Helen and I have this book out, and we just can't keep up with Sarah Palin," Crawford said about Listen Up, Mr. President, the book he co-authored with Helen Thomas.

On the New York Times website yesterday, Stanley Fish said Going Rogue "compelling" and "very well done," even if some of the facts are less-than-accurate. As for her political aspirations, Crawford cautioned anyone against counting her out.

"I often tell my Democrat friends when they're bashing her, 'Boy, that's the sort of thing I heard in 1979 or so when Democrats wanted to run against Reagan,'" he said. "They were just chomping at the bit for him to get the nomination to run because they thought he'd be so easy to beat."

He hopes she'll run on a third party ticket ("That'd be just great") because the country needs to "shake up" its two-party monopoly. Imus wants here nowhere near the government.

"She was the mayor of a saloon, and then she became the governor of a state populated by people who look like they're in the front row of a Willie Nelson concert," he said.

Maybe. But at least she manages to seem sincere, unlike Obama. Crawford called last week's speech by the President "probably the worst of his presidency, so far."

"I don't think he's committed to it," he said of Obama's plans to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, and then bring them home 18 months later, or something. "I never saw him look so pained. He looked like he didn't want to be there, didn't want to give the speech, didn't want to make the decision, and that just came across."

Imus observed that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appears lately not to want to be wherever she is, too. Crawford agreed, and speculated that she must constantly be wondering, "How did this happen? Why am I here and why is he there?"

She would have been a much better President, in Imus's view. "I said that all along," he protested. Funny, we recall a different drumbeat.

-Julie Kanfer