As I said once before, for all her vaunted message discipline and coolness under fire at the debates, it’s amazing how often ominous, outsized statist soundbites slip casually into her rhetoric. Has Obama ever said anything as cartoonish as this?

She defended that decision yesterday, saying she is focusing on proposals with more political support and she is not formally proposing anything she can’t fund without increasing the deficit: “I have a million ideas. The country can’t afford them all.”

Has he ever promised businesses he’ll try “to take those profits” or Americans that he’ll “take things away from you for the common good”? (The “we’re-all-in-it-together society” is more up his alley.) I’m willing to accept that her natural inclinations aren’t this grotesquely confiscatory — well, no, I’m not, really — but if they aren’t, why does she so often suggest that tendency, and so memorably, in her speech?

The country may not be able to afford all her ideas but it sounds like they’re willing to try.