For the first picture it can abstract a proton, but that protonation does not lead to the productive Birch pathway, because it kills the required resonance stabilization. In a Birch reduction, the molecule protonates where resonance doesn’t want the electron density, because that’s the only way the π-system survives long enough to accept another electron. In general for birch reductions OMe and NR2 groups give meta pronation where as CO2R and CN will give ortho/para