Things Never Ever Ever Ever To Debate

Thomas Roberts tweets: "From Monday's show -- Is Obama a lame duck?" Apparently in an effort to scare off anyone who might otherwise be tempted to watch his MSNBC show.

Just cut it out, everyone, right now. It's not an interesting question. It's not a question that's worth debating. It's not a question that's going to shed any light on anything that we really want to know.

It is useful, in my view, to speculate or to analyze a president's current reputation with people in Washington, and to assess how that might affect a battle in Congress or in the bureaucracy. Sure. Regular readers know that I still believe that Neustadt was correct about that. I'll pay a bit of attention, too, to the polling about Obama's popularity, even thought he won't be on a future ballot, because I suspect that Washingtonians (to use Neustadt's fine technical word for people who have to deal with the president) pay attention to it.

But boiling it all down to whether or not a president is a lame duck? A waste of everyone's time.