The great mystery is why robots come off so well in science-fiction films when the human characters are often so astoundingly wooden.

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.

Nixon in 1968, unlike Obama 2008, was elected as a minority president with only 43 percent of the vote. Yet, in 1972, he won what, in some measures, was the most lopsided election in American history with 61 percent.

For Obama to save himself, he should be thinking about the example of an unlikely Republican predecessor: Richard Nixon.

Let us now praise Barack Obama.

Obama lost his ability to push his agenda through Congress when he received what he himself called a 'shellacking' in the November 2010 elections. That shellacking was primarily the result of massive policy overreach when he had a Democratic Congress in his pocket.

Nixon was an awful president in many ways, including in some of his foreign-policy choices. But he left no doubt that foreign policy and America's leadership in the world outside its borders was of paramount importance to him.