When Obama was inaugurated, he and his team had an insight - though whether the insight was conscious or not I don't know. But it was this: The TARP $700 billion price tag was a new kind of model.

This has always been the way of presidential politics. The president rises above the fray while his surrogates go on the attack. They throw the spears and fling the mud; he sits upon the throne.

The real story of the Ground Zero mosque is that the project only became feasible because of the appalling and astonishing fecklessness of the officials who were charged with the reconstruction of the site and the neighborhood all the way back in 2001.

Obama has seen to the passage of the most radical legislation in recent American history and so-called 'progressives' should be thanking him for it - even as many of the rest of us rear in horror from its implications.

Romney is a good, intelligent, extraordinarily generous man who put on a great fight. But he didn't understand the country or the people he sought to lead, and that is why he lost.

Some candidates need to say provocative things that make noise to break through the media muffle and get themselves noticed.

Newt Gingrich has a restless and outsized intelligence that is tragically unleavened by any kind of critical sensibility.