Other than these few historic or magical exceptions, though, the President really can't do much. I'm not even sure why everyone's in a lather about who's going to be President. It's like getting all bothered about who's going to be the next ghost to haunt a faraway castle. Who cares? I don't believe in ghosts anyway. But ghosts are magic, so maybe it does matter who haunts the faraway castle. It also matters that I pay my car insurance. I have to choose my battle. My one battle. I can't care about everything.

Jeff Dorchen commiserates with perhaps the least powerful American of all - Barack Obama, bound by the natural laws of incrementalism and retrograde progress, and missing that magic wand that allowed past presidents to bomb and negotiate their will across history, now limited to sitting in a fogbank and making small tweaks to a machine that may or may not be plugged in.