Last Wednesday marked the anniversary of President Clinton’s historic pronouncement, in the 1996 State of the Union, that “the era of big government is over.” “Not by a long shot,” President Obama seemed to say in his second inaugural last week.

It was “a surprisingly liberal speech” remarked MSNBC’s Chris Hayes: Obama warned us we were in for a “long and sometimes difficult” march toward “sustainable energy sources” and — because this president “reject[s] the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future” — perhaps a presidential war on math.