WASHINGTON — In the weeks ahead, I shall be in Europe to speak on American politics. What will I say to old Europe? Well, I shall give them my broad view of American politics and end with the present election cycle, in which I believe Barack Obama will be retired to private life, though he cannot really conceive of private life. He will continue his public life as he has for all his adult life. That is how Democrats live. He will be a community organizer to the world, as Bill Clinton has become, in the words of MSNBC, “president of the world.”

Both sound ridiculous, but do any Democrats ever retire to private life today? They always are taking on noble causes, which is to say illusory causes. Harry Truman retired to private life and Lyndon Johnson, but not Bill Clinton or Al Gore or, for that matter, Jimmy Carter. The other day, Jimmy wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times, saying we have lost the drug war and he is now smoking while listening to the Grateful Dead onto death. Perhaps he is not listening to the Grateful Dead and possibly he is not smoking marijuana, but I lost interest at about the third sentence. He might well have said almost anything. He has been latching onto fads for 30 years, anything that will keep him in the ink. The reflective life is not for him. It might cause him to become aware of what a miserable president he was.