To cleanse the palate. If he’d forgotten to bring his driver’s license, this clip would have been 24-karat comedy gold. As it is, I’m surprised that he didn’t seize the opportunity to say something about voter ID laws afterward. His own DOJ has sued several states to try to get them lifted; some on the left have already pre-positioned them as a reason to declare Romney’s presidency illegitimate if Obama loses. You’d think O might have thrown them a bone here.

Fun fact: Illinois law doesn’t require voter ID on election day. Only early voters (plus a few others) are legally required to show it. It’s not immediately obvious to me why that is. If you’re going to go so far as to impersonate someone to cast their ballot, you can do it almost as easily on election day as you can weeks in advance provided you’re not stupid enough to try to commit fraud at the same polling place where you intend to cast your own ballot. The theory here, I guess, is that you don’t want to leave a would-be impersonator free to mess with the process for weeks on end. Better to demand ID for early voting and force him to confine his messing with the process to election day itself. Makes “sense.” Seriously, though: If Team O is eager to boost turnout by having its supporters vote early, and yet Illinois makes that impossible for the apparently many Democrats who don’t have ID, why didn’t Obama say something about the law today? Or is this another one of those things, like Bush’s counterterror apparatus, that he secretly favors and only pretends to oppose because his base does?