Commentators might better appreciate the recent constitutional winter (“of our discontent”?) by remembering that Macbeth speaks of the “poor player” who “struts and frets his hour upon the stage” immediately before his famous observation that life is “a tale [t]old by an idiot.”[6] Presidents only have a brief time to remake politics in their image. Time is short both because constitutional rules limit the chief executive to a maximum of two four-year terms and because, in American politics, the political window