I sincerely hope every one of you gets to feel the way U.S. President Barack Obama clearly felt as he delivered his State of the Union address on Tuesday evening. I'd like you all, at some point, to be such cocky bastards and to feel in your blood and show in your stride the words he spoke that night: "I have no more campaigns to run." Which was scripted, and then: "I know, because I won both of 'em." Which was ad-libbed when Republicans jeered the first bit – a tag line that ensured the original throwaway remark would be memorable.
Watching the State of the Union address was like watching a man who had just given his mandatory two years' notice – and who then had some thoughts about the company he'd like to share with everyone present.
There the President was – just talking away, pretty much asking: "What are you going to do, fire me?"– as he all but sat on the edges of the Republicans' desks, looking into their lunch bags.
Two years is how long he has left in office and he knows that, during them, he'll be thwarted at every turn – a fact he now seems to find liberating. It's like he's just having fun at this point.
"It's time we stop treating child care as a side issue, or a women's issue, and treat it like the national economic priority that it is for all of us" he said, sanely.
Predictably, he noted his successes. "We've seen the fastest economic growth in over a decade, our deficit cut by two-thirds, a stock market that has doubled, and health-care inflation at its lowest rate in 50 years," he said. Later he got to "I've seen something like gay marriage go from a wedge issue used to drive us apart to a story of freedom across our country, a civil right now legal in states that seven in 10 Americans call home."
The President had laid out a series of proposals in advance of the address, one of which would see the capital gains tax raised to the 28 per cent of the radical Reagan (how that man is not known as "Ronnie the Red," I'll never know) era. These tax changes are a fine articulation of the Democrats' agenda – but from the mood he appeared to be in that night I expected Mr. Obama to follow that up by just telling us some things he'd personally like to see happen.
"You know what?" I was waiting for the devil-may-care Mr. Obama to say, "I'm going to let gay people fly. I don't know if you can grant people the power of flight by executive order, but I'm going to try, and I don't want soaring gays to be a state-by-state issue. We can't have gays being allowed to fly in some states and not in others because then gay, lesbian and transgender people would have to land and walk through Missouri and Kansas, and that might not be safe.
"Does the LGBT community want to fly? I don't know. I haven't asked them. This one's not about them; I have two years left to get stuff I want to see happen done and you know what I want to see? Flocks of gays.
"And another thing I'm asking for; I always wanted to see bears take cabs. I just think it would look cool. So I will be proposing legislation that says that cabs must pick up bear fares. I urge Congress to pass it. It has as good a shot as anything else I propose, and what I really want to see is the way the bears duck their heads down to get inside the cabs. This will be amazing! We'll have to teach the bears to take cabs. That's something that the scant 5.6 per cent of Americans who are still out of work can be put to work doing.
"Bears don't have tails, you know, my fellow Americans. This shouldn't be too tricky." This earns a nod from Joe Biden.
Mr. Obama's rhetoric was full of those "gosh, I'll have to think about it" questions that plague many political speeches. "Will we allow ourselves to be sorted into factions and turned against one another, or will we recapture the sense of common purpose that has always propelled America forward?" he asked.
But I could see what was in his heart. He wanted to go big with this; insist that America's national symbol become a majestic, soaring, bald gay – or that, what the hell, its elusive common purpose should be helping wildlife spend less time commuting.