How does the president manage to skate his pandering so easily past the press, at least when compared to the treatment reporters dole out to other politicians? I guess the simple answer is he’s better at it. His professed disdain for demagoguery is beguiling. His aspirations sound so lofty that ignoble political tactics used to pursue them are ignored. His political performances are so artful that crassness seems the very last adjective you would use to describe them. He can harrangue with the worst of them. But he manages to convey it with an effective oxymoron: enlightened demagoguery.

Barack Obama can malign opponents without apparent remorse even while he summons Washington to more benign, less implacably partisan politics. Just ask Rep. Paul Ryan, the author of the House Republican’s budget. Invited by the White House to attend the Obama’s recent budget address, he heard the call for serious bipartisan efforts to save the U.S. from a debt crisis, and then had to sit stoically while the president questioned his courage and, it seemed, his love of country.