It does strike me that Obama would like nothing better than for the Republicans to try to impeach him, not just because it would create a great crusade to keep him President, but mainly just to distract from how colossally bad he has been as president. Narcissistic though he is, even he knows somewhere that he will be remembered as a failure as president and will leave office even more discredited than George Bush. He is in this like Gough Whitlam, for whom the dismissal was the best thing that ever happened to him. It wiped from the collective memory of the nation just how awful his government had been. I have an article at Quadrant Online that compares Obama’s desire for impeachment to Whitlam’s salvation through the dismissal The article begins:

It has always seemed plausible that Gough Whitlam sought his own dismissal in 1975. Overseeing a government that, by then and in virtually every respect, was making an absolute shambles of the economy – rapidly rising unemployment combined with rapidly rising inflation – while being caught up in the preposterous Khemlani Loans Affair, Whitlam’s was a government certain to enter history as amongst the worst, if not the worst, in Australia’s history. Having been dismissed by Governor-General Sir John Kerr and gone before the press to declare, “Well may we say ‘God Save the Queen’, because nothing will save the Governor-General”, he then went home and had a hearty lunch, reportedly in the best possible spirits.

The rest of the article is about Obama and his desire for redemption by following in Whitlam’s steps. The article is found here.