The head of President Obama’s National Economic Council suited up for a Monday afternoon news conference with a full lineup of athletic cliches. “We believe manufacturing punches above its weight economically,” he said, and the administration’s trade policy “will level the playing field against countries around the world.”

Like all tragic heroes and most recent French presidents, Nicolas Sarkozy confronts only one truly dangerous opponent in seeking reelection. Sarkozy’s most implacable foe in the balloting that begins in 10 weeks is himself.

Some of them are now suggesting that his contraceptive mandate on religious institutions was a skilled political stratagem. “I’ve found by observing this president closely for years,” argues Daily Beast contributor Andrew Sullivan, “that what often seem like short-term tactical blunders turn out in the long run to be strategically shrewd. And if this was a trap, the religious right walked right into it.” Religious conservatives are now identified, he says, with “opposition to contraception.” Republicans have achieved “fusion with the Vatican.” Obama is evidently playing the very deep game.

You could call it nostalgia liberals versus accountability liberals.

Parting with one’s dreams isn’t only sweet sorrow, it also can be liberating. Beneath the sorrow and alongside the liberation, one finds not only peace but often oneself.

The compromise — in the Obama administration’s assessment, non-compromise — announced by the White House is, in essence, a huge regulatory fig leaf.

For Republicans, being anti-communist didn’t merely mean opposition to the Soviets and their ideology. That kind of anti-communism was all but universal in the United States, from the Republican right to the small, democratic socialist left (and encompassing European socialists as well). For the 45 years after World War II, however, anti-communism was also the Republicans’ ultimate wedge issue in U.S. politics.

Sorry, Rick, you haven’t made it yet as an Eastwood-style make-my-day cultural icon. But in different ways, Santorum and Eastwood have demonstrated the limits of both an entirely negative slant on politics and a pessimistic take on America’s future.

Specifically, he is shouldering the Extreme Marshmallow Cannon.

Obama walked into the State Dining Room at midday Tuesday and encountered 14-year-old Joe Hudy and the compressed-air cannon he invented to launch marshmallows as part of a science fair.

Not ideologically. Despite the Newt Gingrich-peddled notion that “there really is no difference” between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, the gulf in political philosophy is enormous.

The initial reaction concerned the rights of institutions. Catholic organizations naturally resent being forced to buy health insurance that covers sterilization, contraceptives and drugs that can end a pregnancy soon after conception. The Obama administration seems to have calculated that, since contraceptives are popular and the Catholic Church is not, the outcry would be isolated.

Probably.

Even at this point, after Romney trounced Newt Gingrich in the Florida primary and the Nevada caucuses, there are some fairly compelling reasons for Republicans to pause before bowing to the party establishment’s decision that Mitt must be It.

Wisconsin is a swing state in the presidential race. There is a wide-open contest for the U.S. Senate seat held by retiring Democrat Herb Kohl.

— L.P. Hartley, English novelist

It must now be obvious that, economically speaking, we’re in another country. Things we once took for granted no longer apply; things we never imagined occur all the time. We’ve entered a zone of ignorance where familiar experience and ideas count for less. “Thirty years ago, if you’d said that the United States and Europe were going to be the centers of financial crises, people would have thought you were crazy,” says economist Fred Bergsten. The unforeseen is now routine.

The worst day of Sugar Bear’s 55 years was one of the days — there have been many of them — when he got out of prison. In the early 1990s, in a prison where people whose sentences have ended and are being released see those whose sentences are just beginning, he saw one of his sons coming in.

The more compelling questions concern a person’s or an institution’s freedom of conscience and the right to act upon one’s moral beliefs without fear of intimidation and/or government coercion.

Mormonism, he writes on the Web site parkromney.com, “is an insidious contemporary fraud.”

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is “an American cult,” he professes.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has a lot on his mind these days, from cutting the defense budget to managing the drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. But his biggest worry is the growing possibility that Israel will attack Iran over the next few months.

Dina Galassini does not seem to pose a threat to Arizona’s civic integrity. But the government of this desert community believes that you cannot be too careful. And state law empowers local governments to be vigilant against the lurking danger that political speech might occur before the speakers notify the government and comply with all the speech rules.

Congratulations on Florida. Now that you are again the front-runner, and your campaign focus is returning to President Obama, I’d like to call attention to a line you have used repeatedly: “This is a president who fundamentally believes that this next century is the post-American century.” I leave it to the president to describe what he believes, but as the author of the book “The Post-American World,” let me make sure you know what exactly you are attacking.

The president deserves credit for calling out soaring tuition and unsustainable student debt as huge barriers to upward mobility and a strong middle class. But unfortunately, the remedies he sketched in his State of the Union address and in a speech at the University of Michigan last week are textbook examples of proposals meant to signal the president’s “values” (and win votes) while doing little to address the problem.