Obama Longs For His Old Punching Bag John McCain

I bet he does:

Faced with deteriorating economic conditions and an unexpectedly aggressive Republican opponent, President Obama and his aides are expressing nostalgia for Sen. John McCain, the Republican opponent Obama defeated handily in the 2008 election.

At a rally in Minnesota Friday, Obama said Republicans today are in the grip of a "fever" that has caused them to oppose his initiatives virtually across the board. That "fever," Obama said, will make this presidential race against GOP nominee Mitt Romney particularly contentious -- in contrast to the last time, when Obama faced an opponent, McCain, who declined to engage in the kind of hard-hitting fight that many of his Republican supporters hoped he would.

"I mean, 2008 was a significant election, obviously," Obama told the audience at a Minneapolis restaurant called Bachelor Farmer. "But John McCain believed in climate change. John believed in campaign finance reform. He believed in immigration reform. I mean, there were some areas where you saw some overlap."

Now things are different, Obama said, and "we're going to have as stark a contrast as we've seen in a very long time between the candidates." It will only be when Mitt Romney is defeated, the president continued, "that the fever may break, because there's a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that."

That's another way of saying "there's a history of Republicans giving in and doing whatever the Democrats want." McCain was famous for that. Romney...not so much.

McCain wouldn't fight back.  He was too preoccupied with being a "noble loser" rather than fighting to win.  Romney has shown he wants to win more than McCain did and that means Obama is in for a fight that he didn't get last time.