The news media's drawn some heat for its campaign to compare Barack Obama to John F. Kennedy. But maybe they were onto something. This week, President Obama made a decision rooted in a set of shared experience he has with JFK that no elected President in the intervening years can claim. We don't yet know how President Obama will deal with his first "Cuban Missile Crisis" challenge. But we know now: Obama knows snow!

Sure, you can quibble that Jerry Ford knew snow; but he was our only non-elected President. And purists might claim Richard Nixon lived in snowy New York City for a few years in the mid-1960s, but he had a car-and-driver then.

No, Boston and Chicago know snow and so do their sons.

Vice President Joe Biden warned that our enemies would test President Obama early to determine his toughness and determination. The enemy struck this past week as Mother Nature unloaded a full inch and a half of snow on the District of Columbia. Would the President stand tall or wimp out? We didn't have long to wait.

Deriding "snow wimps ," the President told reporters his daughters had a snow day at their new school, something that he said never would have happened back in Chicago. NBC Nightly News showed Obama saying, "My children's school was canceled today, because of, what? ... Some ice? As my children pointed out, in Chicago, school is never canceled. In fact, my seven-year-old pointed out that you'd go outside for recess. You wouldn't even stay indoors."

The Washington Post reported that that the President's

remarks might have captured Washington's attention as much as anything Obama has said since taking office a week ago. With those offhand comments, the president homed in on the one thing that riles Washingtonians every winter. His words reflected a common sentiment among recent arrivals from up North or out West: The denizens of Washington are weather wimps. Life around the Capital Beltway grinds to a halt for climatic events that would barely register in, say, Chicago....

In one sense, the president's gripe was understandable. In Chicago, where his daughters previously attended school, the public schools haven't closed for weather since a 1999 ice storm.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said it would take "a hurricane, an avalanche or a tidal wave" to close schools in Chicago, where until recently he was the schools chief. In Washington, the threshold for closure is somewhat lower.

As for Obama, he kept at it. "I'm saying that when it comes to the weather, folks in Washington don't seem to be able to handle things." ....

At Malia and Sasha's former school, snow days are the stuff of myth.

"I've been here six years, and we haven't closed them yet," not through drifting feet-thick snows, not through freezing winds off Lake Michigan that bring the chill down to 40 below, said David Magill, headmaster of University of Chicago Laboratory Schools.

"There are kids playing in the snow outside my window right now," he said. "They're building a fort."

Chicago obsesses about keeping streets clear. A mayor was voted out of office in 1979 over a blizzard that shuttered the city for days. Snowfall averages 38 inches a year in Chicago, 15 inches in Washington.

So, now we know. And enemies know. No wimps need apply.

Perhaps political advisor David Axelrod will be whispering in the President's ear about lowering expectations, but for now, the President's leadership -- certainly in the eyes of the salt industry -- is unassailable. No Michael Bilandic, he.