IT TOOK SEVEN YEARS...:

President Barack Obama celebrated his 55th birthday the way most middle-aged men do: with a three hour briefing at the Pentagon followed questions about ISIS and Donald Trump, the Zika virus and commuting the sentences of hundreds of prisoners. Sure, it wasnt' the standard cake-and-a-new-tie kind of birthday for the father of two, but it had a certain emblematic quality for the final days of his presidency.

Obama's popularity has crept over 50 percent and his party which suffered so badly in 2010 and 2014--the two midterm elections during his presidency--seems poised to make gains thanks to Donald Trump, a would-be president who has proven to be as unlikely a nominee as the freshman senator did in 2008. Now that he's riding high in the polls, Obama was, as they say, "full of vinegar" at his hour-plus press conference.  [...]

The president boasted about the success of the Iran nuclear deal and dismissed qualms about the newly released video of an American plane landing in Tehran to deliver $400 million to the theocratic regime. The first African-American president was glad to talk about his unprecedented set of prisoner commutations, announced recently, that he described as a kind of down payment of on reversing years of high rates of incarceration in the U.S. Despite a summer of ISIL-inspired attacks, Obama appeared sanguine about defeating the terrorist group, even while he allowed that the lone wolf attacks have been on the rise. "ISIL turns out not to be invincible," he said, noting coalition successes on the battlefield in the Middle East such as the retaking of Fallujah, a much-contested Iraqi city. 

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