The obligatory pit stop on “The View” for America’s first female president. I think this dumb, insulting line is almost a verbal tic for him at this point. He used a variation of it on the trail in 2008 to smear McCain even though Maverick refused to make an issue of his association with Rev. Wright because he didn’t want to be attacked as racist. And now he’s going to use it again to smear Romney supporters and undecideds who end up concluding that he’s been a crappy president, even though we have empirical proof that the name “Barack Hussein Obama” will not in fact prevent someone from winning 365 electoral votes and several southern swing states. If this lame appearance designed to pander to women were anything like a real interview, one of these five would have hit him with the obvious follow-up: Would a president with a funny name be facing a tight election if unemployment had dipped to six percent and we hadn’t hemorrhaged $5 trillion more in debt in three years? Instead, he had to face tough questions about which Kardashian was married to Kris Humphries, which is just the sort of submoronic thing you’d ask if you were trying to help him relate to low-information voters by letting him show his “common touch.”

That’s the first clip. The second clip is him giving himself a grade of “incomplete” on the economy, which, as Jim Geraghty explains, is realistically the only grade he could have given. If he stuck by the “solid B+” he gave himself in 2009 when Oprah interviewed him, Team Mitt and conservative media would have a field day week month with it. If he gave himself a more realistic grade, he’d be inviting voters to throw him out of office. But never mind that. Pay attention at 1:45 when he says, “Everybody sitting on this couch is probably going to have to pay a little bit more in taxes so we don’t have to raise taxes for middle-class families.” Is that a reference to letting the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy lapse or a reference to the Buffett Rule? I think he meant the former but, given how much time he’s spent lately talking about the latter, it’ll probably be perceived as a reference to that. In no sphere of fiscal reality will the chump change raised by the Buffett Rule offset the amount of revenue that could be raised by taxing the middle class, but as I’ve said before, I think that’s the impression O wants voters to have — that if only we raise taxes on the rich a little bit and trim a little fat on the budget, our problems will be solved. That’s not remotely true but misleading voters in that way is hugely useful for a campaign based in part on stoking class resentment. In fact, guess which unlikely truthteller blurted out the following at a D.C. event today:

“This is just me now, I’m not speaking for the White House — I think you could tax me at a 100 percent and you wouldn’t balance the budget… We are all going to have to contribute to this, and if middle class people’s wages were going up again, and we had some growth to the economy, I don’t think they would object to going back to tax rates [from]” … before the Bush tax cuts.

Surprise.