Speaking to students at a Maryland community college, President Obama indulged one of the left’s favorite vanities — the claim to represent “the future.” His topic was energy. The president warned against Republicans who want “an energy strategy for the last century that traps us in the past.” He compared today’s Republicans who are less enthusiastic than he about government subsidies for “wind, solar and biofuels,” to the “flat earth society” and to President Rutherford B. Hayes, who supposedly disdained the telephone.

The president had those students chuckling and grinning and feeling smugly superior to benighted Republicans who are so stuck in the past. They always were; look at Hayes!