I suggest in this week's editorial that the newly invigorated 2012 Romney-Ryan campaign may end up resembling the upbeat, forward-looking Obama 2008 campaign more than the dour Obama 2012 campaign does. Here's another straw in the wind: This week, President Obama derided Romney-Ryan economics as "trickle-down fairy dust." In 2008, Bill Clinton famously exclaimed, on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, "Give me a break. This whole thing [the Obama campaign] is the biggest fairytale I’ve ever seen." So both Obama 2008 and Romney-Ryan 2012 have been attacked as fairy-like. 

But generally speaking, in modern American politics, it's better to be on the side of fairy tales and fairy dust. As Bill and Hillary Clinton learned in 2008.

And so I predict President Obama will soon abandon the fairy dust attack on Romney-Ryan. After all, he knows as well as anyone that we all aspire to enter (at least briefly) or at least to glimpse the Land of Faery, as Yeats explains, "Where nobody gets old and godly and grave / Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise / Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue."