Paul Ryan hasn't lacked for a job since he left college as the golden child of Wisconsin Republican politics, riding his family connections into a job with then-Senator Bob Kasten.

As he enters his final term, with the elegiac music playing out there in the distance, Barack Obama will use the history that he has come to embody and, perhaps, even to fulfill, as part of a larger project that never will be completed but only finished, over and over again.

The creative project of self-government - hard and frustrating but necessary - is to produce that political commonwealth that changes over time, that can change sometimes by the minute, if circumstances intervene.

Charlie Pierce Quotes