Barack Obama knows that the Buffett Rule won’t do a thing for the trillion-dollar annual deficits he keeps running up, that his Obamacare will result in more massive borrowing, that the “unelected” Supreme Court has a perfect right to overturn any laws its majority feels are unconstitutional. He knows that we are producing massive amounts of free-market fossil-fuel energy on private land, while producing less on public land and almost no energy at all through federal subsidized wind and solar. All the lectures on fat cats and on junkets to Vegas are in contrast to first-family treks to Vegas, Aspen, Vail, Martha’s Vineyard, and Costa del Sol. A mini-industry of speechwriters has gone beyond tapping the old canned refrains like “punching above their weight,” “cover your back,” “let me be perfectly clear” to collating entire paragraphs of four-year-old formulaic nonsense about the debt, taxes, “we’ve tried that before” (two centuries of “that,” which led to a $48,000 per capita income?), and paying your fair share that is recycled again and again. There can be no more presidential weighing in on race, after the Gates and Martin fiascos, no more civility sermons as he unleashes more of the them/us boilerplate, no more mytho-histories about our vast but unappreciated debts to the Muslim world. The problem is not just that all this is talk, talk, talk, but increasingly that it’s the same old talk, talk, talk.

Reset abroad is over and we have an autopilot foreign policy of just wishing and hoping that a China, North Korea, Iran, etc., do not want to gamble to get what they can in 2012 while the getting is good; Japan and Germany are beginning to see that the U.S. is not committed to their defense as in the past. “Bush did it” is now stale and off the shelf.

Obama knows that for the Senate to propose a budget, for him to embrace his own Simpson-Bowles Commission, to address the deficits and entitlement time bombs, or to reform the tax code requires the sort of statesmanship that one does not learn in Chicago political organizing.

So we are left with the Obama wars against the Supreme Court, Paul Ryan, the Republican Congress, the fat cats and the one-percenters, the Catholic Church, as well as the supposed Republican war against women and more racial divisiveness as the president tries to cobble together a 51 percent majority on the general theme that Romney’s house, wife, and cars are symbolic of “them” — the “them” who are responsible for his own four years of 8-plus percent unemployment, little growth, record deficits, sky-high gas, and mounting debt.

I think after the Republican cannibalism ceases, and the more Obama flies around to $40,000-a-plate fundraisers to recite this tired them/us class-warfare saga, polls will show at some point that a lot of independents and some Democrats are getting very worried that the chickens that both Clintons warned about in spring 2008 are coming home to roost.