“As he turned to make the walk back to Air Force One,” Jon wrote, “a breeze blew–and everybody scurried anew, to keep up with him. It was that kind of day–and it has been that kind of presidency: Barack Obama, moving as he wishes to move, and the world bending itself to him.”

You could just imagine everybody reading this if anybody read Newsweek. They would admire the rich, fecund gorgeousness of Jon’s prose–a breeze blew / scurried anew–and nod and tap their lower lips with their index fingers, because while everybody will say that Jon’s point is true, it isn’t. What Jon wrote, in fact, is the direct opposite of the truth. Even as the sentence was being written, the president was violating several campaign promises for the simple reason that he has had to bend himself to the world, as presidents usually do. And a good thing, too.

It was that kind of week: While flipping the pages of the new Newsweek, it began to occur to everybody that, hey, this is a pretty stupid idea for a magazine. Are there really 1.5 million magazine readers–the number of subscribers Jon has promised advertisers–who want a liberal opinion magazine written by liberals who don’t want to admit they’re liberals? Last week everybody looked at one another and pondered a world without Newsweek.