Am I the only Jew in America who finds the House majority leader deeply embarrassing to our people? Am I the only tribe member who considers this smarmy yutz today’s numero-uno shonda fur die goyim?

Shonda what?

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My father used to tell us a morality tale. Not long after the events of November 22 and 24, 1963, our rabbi attended an interfaith meeting of clergymen from our midsize New Jersey town. He later reported to his congregation a conversation he’d had at the gathering. “The Protestant minister,” Dad would say, “said to the rabbi, ‘I see one of your people got Lee Harvey Oswald.’ Jack Ruby was Jewish, you know. [Right, Dad, I know from the other 18 times you’ve told me the story.] And the rabbi said, ‘Yes, and I see one of yours got the president.’”

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1994 looms large for the president, too. The economy has improved under his watch, but not enough, and certainly not in time, to sway an anxious electorate. He has scored major legislative victories, but early enough in his term that voters have forgotten about them. The Republicans have succeeded in convincing large numbers of Americans that he is somehow strange, "not one of us." A big loss, giving the GOP control of the House, seems inevitable.

But if the Republicans want to make this year 1994 redux, Barack Obama needs to make it 1995, when a rebuked Democratic president rebounded by depicting himself as protector-in-chief -- protector of average Americans against the depredations of a band of radicals out to make middle-class lives less secure and less safe. What Obama’s got going for him, just like what Bill Clinton had going for him, is an opposition whose loudest voices are not only extreme but extremely quotable, and a majority of the electorate that does not trust extremists.

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