The College Fix

After describing failed hopes for a post-partisan Washington, President Obama blasted Republicans Friday afternoon at the University of Southern California, while campaigning for Sen. Barbara Boxer and gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown.

“Abraham Lincoln, who by the way, couldn’t get a nomination in today’s Republican party,” Obama said during the speech, which criticized Republicans on a variety of issues, but particularly the economy.

Earlier today, at a campaign event for Boxer, Obama asked donors, “Can you imagine him (Lincoln) trying to run — with these folks?”

The president also used his extended metaphor for the Republican response to the economic crisis — in which the economy, a car, is stuck in a ditch and Republicans stand by “kicking dirt” and “sipping on Slurpees” while Democrats like Obama, Boxer, and Brown worked to get the car out of the ditch, until Republicans eventually ask for the keys back once the car is out of the ditch. Obama said Republicans would have to sit in the back seat, because middle-class Americans needed room in the car.

In recent speeches, Obama had excised the word Slurpee from the speech, but today it returned.

“Their whole campaign strategy is amnesia,” Obama said of Republicans. “This election is a choice between moving forward and going backward, and I don’t know about you, Trojans, but I wanna go forward.”

Obama was, however, candid about the difficult road faced for the Democrats in November.

“Let me be clear, this is going to be an incredibly difficult election,” Obama told the crowd, which was expected to exceed 30,000.

He framed the sluggish economy as long-term change, and asked rally attendees to look beyond the presidential politics, to see the 2008 election as a movement that needed sustained effort.

“Inch-by-inch, day-by-day we’ve been grinding it out because that’s the nature of change in a complex democracy,” Obama said.

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