[Vobject] "ImportError: No module named _thread"

[Adam Tauno Williams]

Not really a vObject question;  but after installing openSUSE 12.1 and
doing an easy_install of vobject I cannot import it since an import of
dateutil.rrule fails with -

>>> import dateutil.rrule
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/dateutil/rrule.py", line
13, in <module>
    import _thread
ImportError: No module named _thread

Searches of the interwebs finds people with the same issue but no
resolution.  Isn't this Python 3 syntax?  Is this pulling the wrong
version of dateutil?  Everything other than dateutil.rrule seems to work
fine.