By all our traditional Christmas standards, Barack Obama must have been a wonderful child this year. Even before the year started, St. Nicholas brought him such armfuls of presents, they overflowed even the most capacious of stockings, and barely fit under the tree.

Christmas 2012 started in 2009-2010, when Republicans were given a boxload of candidates who wouldn’t be ready until 2016, leaving them with a handful of used toys from last time, too scruffed-up and dingy for use. Gift No. 1 came in October 2011, when Chris Christie, dragged to the gate by a cohort of activists, refused to go in at the very last moment, leaving the field to one rerun — Mitt Romney — and a vast cast of others, too scary to think of, whose only excuse for running for anything was that they were filling the vacuum that nature abhors.