Rats abandoning a sinking ship isn't a novelty but when it's the Good Ship Obamapop, it's newsworthy:

NIMBYMP! Not in my back yard, Mr. President!

Democrat incumbents and wannabes from Missouri to Florida to Nebraska are treating Obama as if he were afflicted with the plague and a Death Panel has already passed sentence.

No fools they, the Dem pols would rather go it alone rather than have a presidential albatross around their necks. It makes sense, too, considering his endorsement track record success of zero percent: Virginia, New Jersey, Massachusetts.

Actually he's zero for four if we count his and Michelle's desperate failed trip to Copenhagen to bring home the 2016 Summer Olympics to Chicago. That first-round elimination was a humiliating face slap, repeated in December via a humiliating rebuke at the global climate talks, also in Copenhagen.

Not ready to get slapped silly by voters come November, "A Democratic Senate candidate in Missouri denounced the budget's sky-high deficit. A Florida Democrat whose district includes the Kennedy Space Center hit the roof over NASA budget cuts. And an endangered Senate Democrat denounced proposed cuts in farm subsidies."

The only problem with that analysis is that just about every Dem running this year is "endangered." Just ask Virginia State Sen. Creigh Deeds, former New Jersey Governor John Corzine, and Massachusett's A.G. Martha Coakley what happened last year.

Also, with a rampant anti-incumbency fever infecting the electorate, every Dem officeholder, federal, state, or local, is more vulnerable since the leader of their pack is the guy most responsible for the fever.

As a Baltimore Sun article put it, "It is a time-tested campaign tactic for politicians to declare their independence of party leaders. But the tactic is particularly important for Democrats this year, because their party dominates Washington, and being an insider is a political liability in an anti-incumbent climate."

Pointed questions proffered by perspiring Dems at an Obama Q&A session yesterday only served to heighten the feeling that they are unhappy campers in Obama's Camp Sweaty. As Senator, (not "Madame") Boxer said, "California is hurting:" [http://bit.ly/9bJ05U]

FYI, we're all hurting, Madame Senator, and Democrats have caused most of the hurt and people know it. Even more people will know it in nine months and by Election Day you and your compatriots will better understand Muhammed Ali's fair warning: You can run but you cannot hide.

Nimbs, Not in my Barack Store!

It seems as if it were only a year or so ago that all things associated with the new president were cherished trophies, keepsakes, collectibles, probably because it was only a year or so ago.

Now, another sign of the times has become a sign that people aren't quite as excited about the Man from the Windy City. Owning a baseball cap or a keychain or a calendar emblazoned with the magical word "Obama" doesn't quite hold the same mystique as it did back then.

An "Obama Shop," similar to the thousands of "Bush Shops" which dotted the country in 2000, formerly and appropriately located in the basement of Washington's Union Square train station, has been converted into the Little Shop of Shuttered Dreams.

It's now looking forlorn and abandoned behind its boarded-up display windows.

Whereas only a year ago the place was all a-bubble with Obamafficionados elbow to elbow, tourists and locals, vying to buy trinkets and other useless baubles and mementos, it's a vacant testimony to the evanescence of popularity.

A sign within a sign that the Obama honeymoon is long over is the fact that the Obama Shop story appeared in the pages of another deserting lover, US News and World Report, which gratuitously added this jibe to its tale of woe: "Perhaps the faltering economy (which Obama has nothing to do with, he keeps telling us) played a role." (emphasis added)

"The store carried every imaginable product with the words 'Obama' and 'Commemorative,' except, notably, the Obama Chia Pet," according to the article.

(Editor's note: It was indeed notable that the Chia Pet and probably the Obama Bobblehead were absent from the Obama Store. I was fortunate enough to receive both as Christmas presents and the Chia Obama never sprouted and the Bobblehead stopped bobbling.)

The timely demise of the Obama Store is "tangible evidence" of the figurative demise of America's first superstar president, as the USN&WR piece contends.

It would be sad were it not so fitting.

However, Sarah Palin's call for Obama's resignation may be somewhat premature despite Democrat bailouts and tourists' loss of interest in all things Obama.

When things really hit rockbottom with the economy, the president could always call a state of national emergency, declare martial law, and nationalize every facet of our economy.

That may have been his devious plan all along, the Chicago method translated to the national stage.