It was a dark and stormy campaign

Earlier this week some wiseacre professor at the Columbia School of Journalism held a George Will parody contest for his students in a seminar on the making of the modern punditocracy. The assignment required writing the lede for one of Will’s columns. The only ground rule was that references to baseball and Edmund Burke were strictly prohibited. Here’s the entry that garnered second place:

Energetic in body but indolent in mind, Barack Obama in his frenetic campaigning for a second term is promising to replicate his first term, although simply apologizing would be appropriate. His long campaign’s bilious tone — scurrilities about Mitt Romney as a monster of, at best, callous indifference; adolescent japes about “Romnesia” — is discordant coming from someone who has favorably compared his achievements to those of “any president” since Lincoln, with the “possible” exceptions of Lincoln, LBJ and FDR. Obama’s oceanic self-esteem — no deficit there — may explain why he seems to smolder with resentment that he must actually ask for a second term.