“Mommy, I’m boring.”  Three year old.

For the past ten or eleven years Chicago has become almost a second home to me and several members of our family. Our youngest daughter has suffered from a rare neurological disorder and her needs, we feel, can only be met by a wonderful neurosurgeon there.

After Obama won his first election, I knew I would be facing two problems when I had to go to Chicago. One was the inevitable Sarah Palin ugliness and bashing and the other was my distaste for Obama and what to say to my many friends in his “hometown.”

Our first trip came just a few weeks after the election and I made a decision I could best defend Sarah Palin by saying that not only was she not stupid, but that I resented my friend Sarah being lied about. I would just mumble, “Ummmm”, about Obama.

We went to pick up our rental car just out of O’Hare and I sat down to wait while my husband took care of business. A gentleman I assumed worked for the rental agency came over to me and said, “I hear you’re from Alaska. Do you know Sarah Palin?” “Yes, and she’s lovely,” I said.  He broke into a big grin and told me he thought she was so beautiful and he hoped she would run for president someday. So far my plan was going well. Then he asked, “What do you think of Obama?” Before I could even get the “Ummm” out, he looked furtively around and said, quietly, “Some of us here have his number. He’s not as smart as you hear, but his real problem is he’s lazy and he gets bored very easily. You watch, he’ll last only a few weeks, maybe a month, and he’ll hate being president and start looking around for excitement. He’ll also be following the ways of crooked Chicago politics.” He then recounted to me the stories of how he won elections and his shady land deals. The stories that would later come out were never any surprise to me.

We were in the middle of all this intrigue when my husband came to get me. The gentleman shook our hands, raised his finger to me and said, “You watch. What I told you is true.”

Apparently Valerie Jarrett has said that Obama has been bored his whole life. That’s at least part of his problem.

I laughed when my friend’s three year old said she was “boring.” When my own children came along I tried to teach them that only “boring” people get  “bored” and that really “smart” people don’t get bored. Not one of them now ever tells me they’re bored. Evidently the President was not taught, or at least has never learned, that lesson.

To me he has always been a boring bore.

I did use my defense of Sarah Palin several times, so I’ll post a couple of those funny stories tomorrow.