The Sunday funny papers

A couple of weeks ago at a health care town hall thingy, Obama made a joke when asked about bureaucrats coming to granny's house to help her plan her trip on the ice float; you could tell he found the absurdity of that question...well...absurd, but Jon Stewart, watching the clip, nervously adjusted his tie and croaked, The dry wit may not be such a good idea."

Matt Bai concurs, but finds refreshing the wit of a man who does indeed find much of what he's dealing with absurd and many of the people around him absurder still.

Obama is hardly the first television-age president to employ a sometimes unsettling wit. John Kennedy remarked in advance of the 1960 campaign that his father had asked him not to buy too many votes because he wasn’t about to pay for a landslide, and presidents have long turned to professional joke writers to humanize them. What makes Obama’s humor more combustible isn’t just its spontaneity but also its distinctly postmodern, Seinfeldian premise. There’s an absurdist quality to the president’s less serious side, a sense that he woke up this morning to find himself occupying this singularly bizarre place in American life and that he has just now become aware that he’s the only sane guy in the room.

This was the impulse he displayed last year when the Democratic candidates were asked in a debate before the Nevada caucuses to disclose their own weaknesses. Obama, answering first, admitted that he inclined toward messiness, while Hillary Clinton and John Edwards self-servingly confessed to caring too gosh-darn much about other people. “If I had gone last, I would have known what the game was,” Obama joked afterward, with mock bewilderment. “I could have said: ‘Well, you know, I like to help old ladies across the street. Sometimes they don’t want to be helped. It’s terrible.’ ” More recently, Obama sounded mystified by plans for a new presidential helicopter. “The helicopter I have now seems perfectly adequate to me,” he remarked dryly. “Of course, I’ve never had a helicopter before, you know? Maybe I’ve been deprived and I didn’t know it.” Other presidents mastered the telling of the canned political joke. Obama’s shtick is that he finds such stagecraft, the falsity and pomposity of modern politics, to be as laughable as we do.

Such a perspective is entirely new in the White House, born perhaps of the same deconstructionist ethos that gave us “The Simpsons” and The Onion — self-aware acts of ridicule that would have seemed wholly out of place in the age of “All in the Family.” Our more recent presidents, reared in the age after the Great Depression and World War II, have tended to be deeply earnest types, class presidents and conventional insiders, the kind of men who affixed their flag pins to their lapels without a second thought. Parody, on the other hand, is an act of subversion, the province of the kid in the back row who refuses to grant the institution its inherent authority. In such moments of transgression, Obama seems inherently uncomfortable with the garish décor of the imperial presidency. With each self-mocking digression, he registers a small blow against the excessive reverence for the office that made possible, in some measure, the missteps of his predecessor.

Elsewhere in the same paper, Charlie Savage writes that Obama may also have decided that voters expecting him to deliver on his campaign promises are absurder still.

WASHINGTON — President Obama has issued signing statements claiming the authority to bypass dozens of provisions of bills enacted into law since he took office, provoking mounting criticism by lawmakers from both parties.

President George W. Bush, citing expansive theories about his constitutional powers, set off a national debate in 2006 over the propriety of signing statements — instructions to executive officials about how to interpret and put in place new laws — after he used them to assert that he could authorize officials to bypass laws like a torture ban and oversight provisions of the USA Patriot Act.

In the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama called Mr. Bush’s use of signing statements an “abuse,” and said he would issue them with greater restraint. The Obama administration says the signing statements the president has signed so far, challenging portions of five bills, have been based on mainstream interpretations of the Constitution and echo reservations routinely expressed by presidents of both parties.

Still, since taking office, Mr. Obama has relaxed his criteria for what kinds of signing statements are appropriate. And last month several leading Democrats — including Representatives Barney Frank of Massachusetts and David R. Obey of Wisconsin — sent a letter to Mr. Obama complaining about one of his signing statements.

“During the previous administration, all of us were critical of the president’s assertion that he could pick and choose which aspects of Congressional statutes he was required to enforce,” they wrote. “We were therefore chagrined to see you appear to express a similar attitude.”

However, the story does make clear that it's a a matter of degree. Obama has shown a great deal of restraint when compared to the constitutional abuses of his predecessor, and he's supported by a number of officials from the Clinton adminstration who say that signing statements allow an important bill to go into law despite flaws in its composition. Most importantly, the Obama administration hasn't evoked the "Unitary Executive" theory under which the Bush administration ruled as though the other branches were subservient to the Executive. In other words, I'm not too worried about this alleged abuse of power, though I am gladdened that Congress is pushing its perogatives in ways it tended to avoid the previous eight years.

Still, two central characteristics of Obama's administration seem to be a tendency to be embarrassed by the trappings of the gilded presidency and at the same time protective of its Constitutional power.

UPDATED for syntax.