The Big Hangover is a flopped ’50s film that is better forgotten, but it is the permanent state of Barack Obama, still in his bathrobe and feeling quite queasy, due to a headache called Bush. “Six years in, Barack Obama is still battling a Bush hangover,” says Politico. “The hangover was much, much worse than I think any president’s been left with,” said Howard Dean. “Barack Obama has had to clean up the mess that was left him,” said Barbara Boxer. “The rising chaos in Iraq—and the blame game over who’s responsible—are the latest reminders that halfway through his own second-term he’s still more consumed by dealing with the legacy of President George W. Bush than building his,” said the reporter. “Obama supporters see a president who found himself so deep in so many holes from his very first day in office that cleaning up the aftermath of the previous eight years was going to take at least eight of his own.”

Just eight? It’s a good thing we now have term limits, or it might be taking him twelve years, or even sixteen. Certainly, Presidents Ronald Reagan and Franklin D. Roosevelt never stopped kvetching—in their eight and twelve years-plus-three-months years respectively—about the burdens left them by Carter and by Hoover that kept them from getting anything done. That kept their approval ratings rock bottom, that tied their hands in the arena of foreign relations, and kept them from getting bills passed. Clearly it’s that millstone called “Bush” that drags Obama down, confined every day to the golf course and fund-raisers, too depressed and almost too sad to go on.