2012 Decoded

"Sometimes, when I brought friends home after school, my mother would overhear them remark about the lack of food in the fridge or the less-than-perfect housekeeping, and she would pull me aside and let me know that she was a single mother going to school again and raising two kids, so that baking cookies wasn't exactly at the top of her priority list, and while she appreciated the fine education I was receiving at Punahou, she wasn't planning on putting up with any snotty attitudes from me or anyone else, was that understood?"

President Obama's approval ratings are subterranean, his policies are anathema to a sizeable segment of the electorate, and personality-wise, he is so brainy and tempermentally reserved - the much-analyzed "coolness" factor - that he finds it difficult to connect with voters in the feel-your-pain way that Bill Clinton did.

There would seem to be no limit to the slices of the president that a clever Republican opponent could sink his teeth into. But his "privileged" upbringing? As someone in Texas Gov. Rick Perry's inner circle should have told him yesterday, that dog won't hunt.

Instead, the presidential contender went on Fox News' Sean Hannity Show and mused that Obama "grew up in a privileged way ... He never had to really work for anything. He never had to through what Americans are going through."