Obama's Trip To New Jersey: A Bust?

If the Newark Star-Ledger - soul sister to the Old Grey Whore down in Times Square - goes in with this lede, you know maybe this visit might have gone even worse than it sounds:

Mixed N.J. response to President Obama's visit


Margaret Wert was not impressed by President Obama’s visit to her flood-ravaged Wayne neighborhood today.

"The president’s lucky I didn’t get to meet him," said Wert, 45, pausing from an afternoon of scrubbing her Fayette Avenue home, the stench of mildew wafting out the front door. "Because I would have handed him a broom."

"I think it was a big photo shoot for Mr. Obama," said Wert, a customer service agent for the Anon Flag Company, who declined to give her party affiliation. "When he comes back again, I’ll let him do my yard work."


Now if this is the best spin they can lay down, well...

Some of Wert’s neighbors welcomed the president.

Some?  Not many, apparently.  The Asbury Park Press, the Milhouse to the NYT's Bart Simpson, pretends it sees a more "enthusiastically received" Barack Obama, but only by speaking strictly to those on line at a ...designated photo-op. 

Note the APP does not quote the responses to some of the president's lazy bromides:

In Wayne, Obama walked past open garages and piles of water-logged debris that littered the curbs, stopping at about eight homes.

“I’m so sorry. We’ll be here to help,” Obama told one woman.

“We’ll do everything we can,” he told another man, who was shirtless.

I would love to have seen, or at least heard more about, Obama's encounter with this "shirtless man". Did Obama recoil? Or did the shirtless man? And what of the expression on "one woman's" face, when Obama inadvertently conjured up Reagan's old curse on Big Government:

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, " I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

No, this didn't seem to go very well at all for Barack.  Harried by shirtless men and angry women, he high-tailed it out of the Garden State after barely three hours.   Smart move, for once.  The way Obama's luck has been going, if he stuck around Jersey any longer, he'd be getting flattened on the boardwalk right about now by Ronnie Ortiz-Magro....