I actually think agendas are more often found in State of the Union speeches than in inaugural speeches.

A lot of Democrats are not that upset with Howard Dean. Howard Dean gets out here and he says these inflammatory things, and he doesn't apologize. He doesn't back down a little bit.

Can't disagree with the need for a grasp of history.

Hope springs eternal, even in politics.

People do still cheer for the President. And some of the military audiences are more likely to cheer than others. I have seen him speak lately in front of groups like Freedom House, where the applause was a long time coming.

If it were the Clinton people, they'd be sitting around figuring out how to pull themselves out. Instead the president is continuing to go around the country and peddling Social Security, which the needle is not moving on.

Aspiring black leaders are often asked to transcend race, even though no one ever asked, say, Hillary Clinton to transcend gender. This is a precarious race straddle that most members of the breakthrough generation seem to reject. Even the most well meaning white Obama supporters seem to take deep satisfaction in this idea. Obama, they insisted, could be raceless, a reasurringly optimistic view of America's deepest burden that ignores countless peices of evidence to the contrary.