One of the reasons why Barack Obama is regarded as the greatest orator of our age is that he's always banging on about some other age yet to come — e.g., the Future! A future of whose contours he is remarkably certain and boundlessly confident:

To the president, they're just "bumps in the road" to the sunlit uplands of "the future." Forward! Obama has lived on "the promise of the future" all his life — Most Promising Columbia Grad of 1983, Most Promising Community Organizer of 1988, Most Promising Fake Memoirist of 1995, Most Promising Presidential Candidate of 2008 ...

The rest of us, alas, have to live in the present that he has made, which is noticeably short of promise. The Chinese Politburo get it, Tsar Putin in the Kremlin gets it and even the nutters doing the "Death to the Great Satan!" dance on the streets of Cairo and Lahore get it. On Nov. 6, we'll find out if the American people do.