"He's totally eclipsed. Nothing he says is going to be important for anything that happens in the next 12 months. The speech is a nonevent."

Did you watch the State of the Union Address?

We did, talking over it a lot of the time. How can we feel that a man who is President doesn't matter anymore? Somehow we do. At least when he's making a speech. He may yet do something that could make us change our well-settled opinions. But let's hope that nothing much happens in the next year. When things capable of transforming the reputation of a President happen, they're usually bad. So let's hope the battered old man drifts further into oblivion over the next year, and when the State of the Union comes around again we have the occasion to get all excited about the seemingly boundless potential of another human individual.