'If Obama knows, Obama goes ...'

We're just seven days away from the big Olympics decision and the world is buzzing about whether President Obama will make a cameo. Recent reports say that he will, and Thom Serafin, President and CEO of Serafin & Associates, Inc. agrees.

“If Obama knows, Obama goes,” said Serafin on FOX-Chicago this morning.

Advance teams have been deployed to preserve the option. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has coyly remarked it is “absolutely” a possibility. All this leaves the president in perfect position to bring home the trophy.

“You’ve got to hand it to Lori Healey, she’s been running the 2016 bid and she’s got everybody going,” said Serafin, noting Governor Quinn, Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama to be among the members of Chicago’s star-studded bid delegation.

There was no shortage of topics to talk about in Illinois’ political world today, with a new Chicago Sun Times report saying that Rahm Emanuel wanted then-Governor Rod Blagojevich to appoint Cook County Commissioner Forrest Claypool as a placeholder in Congressional District seat.

Is this, as Claypool says, “insanity?”

Serafin suggests things may not be so black and white.

“We won’t know until the tapes come out,” said Serafin, noting that the law requires an election—not an appointment—and implying this was something the tactical Emanuel surely understood. However, Serafin also notes that federal courts reporter Natasha Korecki, who reported the story, is very good and "rarely wrong."

“Rahm knows he’s not going to be in the White House forever,” he said. “Everyone knows he wants to go back to the House of Representatives and he’d be a heck of a lot better Speaker than the current Speaker.”

The President is selling -- is America buying?

President Obama is selling the healthcare plan, one television appearance at a time while a national controversy over ACORN continues to brew.

Is the President overexposed? Where do Illinois politicians stand on ACORN?

President/CEO of Serafin & Associates, Inc. Thom Serafin attacks these issues & more on FOX-Chicago this morning.

Obama 'out-foxed' right on schools speech

Despite all the brouhaha preceding President Obama’s speech to students, Obama managed to deliver a speech long on feel-good themes and short on the controversy that critics had anticipated, Thom Serafin, President and CEO of Serafin & Associates, Inc., says during this appearance on Fox News Chicago.

“The White House kind of out-foxed the conservative pundits on the other side who were complaining about what they might do, what they may not do,” Serafin says.

The White House was smart enough to take the president’s speech in this direction, causing the barrage of rhetorical grenades lobbed in advance of the speech to fall inert, Serafin says.

“The president is going to tell the children this morning, ‘If you’re quitting on your education, you’re quitting on your country. Wash your hands. Make sure you don’t go to school if you’re sick. Don’t get other people sick in your school,’” Serafin says, referring to pre-released text of the president’s speech. “Those are wonderful messages, that’s God, apple pie and country.”

In this appearance, Serafin also discuses the resignation of Van Jones, Obama’s environmental czar, amid reports that Jones made inflammatory remarks about Republicans and joined a petition questioning whether the federal government had a role in permitting the Sept. 11 attacks.

While he is distinguished on environmental matters, Serafin says that Jones “is off the center on some of these other issues.”

“Communism went out with the Brady Bunch,” Serafin says. “It’s been a long time since we look at communism as an attractive alternative.”

Also in this appearance on Fox, Serafin discusses the evolving political dynamics of the war in Afghanistan.