The Daily Show, one had to believe, had fallen off. Sapped of his steady stream of Bush- and Cheny-isms, Jon Stewart exposed himself as just another starstruck commentator from the time President Obama became a major player in the 2008 presidential campaign. Stewart still hasn’t come up with a consistent angle on the new president, but I think he hit on something a few weeks ago; after playing a clip of Obama’s recent Gettysburg-esque speech on gas mileage, in which he rejects the notion that “our nation [is] too divided, our people too weary of broken promises and lost opportunities to take up a historic calling,” Stewart said, “don’t blow your load on mileage, baby. Save it for when the Chinese invade.”

Obama is indeed the consummate load-blower, capable of conjuring weighty addresses from the most workaday policies. It’s this epic oratory that seemed to form the real contrast in Thursday’s “dueling speeches,” which pitted Obama against Dick Cheney on national security. Of all the conservatives trying to revitalize the Republican party, Cheney is the wonkiest; his ability to nimbly tiptoe — and overstep — the letter of the law without regard to stirring speech is both chilling and weirdly refreshing.

Cheney was never the typical Vice President (no Joe Biden he), but maybe he’s always been the typical post-administration Vice President. Out of office and no longer even remotely responsible for national morale, Cheney, on a certain level, has no need to give a shit. He can be as Machiavellian as he always has been, citing the safety of the American people (whatever that is) as an end worthy of torture and invasion of privacy. While Obama makes flowery recourse to our founding fathers every time he defends himself, Cheney looks to the future — and if we don’t do what he says, the story goes, it will be a scary future indeed. In other words, at least on matters of national security, Cheney is the anything-goes liberal to Obama’s constitutional conservative.

But on a different level, of course, there has never been a time when Dick Cheney gave more of a shit. The nation is in the frightening throes of Bush-era image reconnaissance, the beginning of a history that will end, according to the Hannity-Limbaugh crowd, with a gentler attitude towards the Bush years. Cheney, like Obama, is still campaigning.

And why not? Whatever his record as president, Obama has probably been the best candidate in a century. And among the most practiced — he’s essentially been campaigning since his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. All this has already been said, and Cheney and Obama have already accused one another of conflating politics and policy. But did the distinction ever exist in the first place?

Much has been made of the Bushies’ choice of “enhanced interrogation” over “torture.” The euphemism is an obvious political move, but it also marks a distinction that Cheney himself highlighted on Thursday. He treated waterboarding and Abu Gharib as two separate issues, one an unsavory means of getting important information, the other an isolated, and pointless, sadism. Cheney’s defense of “enhanced interrogation” reflects a general Bush-era policy philosophy — information that may save American lives must be gotten at any cost. When is torture not torture? When it’s interrogation.

Obama’s language is no less filled with a policy agenda that doubles as a careful political weaponry. There are the “glimmers of hope” and the Lincoln bit, of course, which are getting more grating with each passing speech. There’s the whole “receivership” business, the whole effort to make nationalization of the banking system seem as temporary as possible. But Obama’s most prolific euphemisms are on national security. The “War on Terror” is now the “overseas contingency operation” (surely Bush prefers the hawkish capitals, and Obama the level-headed lowercase), acts of terrorism are now “man-caused disasters,” and “unlawful enemy combatants” at Guantanamo are now just “detainees,” although Obama reserves the right to treat them like war criminals- waterboarding remains at his personal discretion, and the “class five” detainees still supposedly at war with America can be imprisoned indefinitely.

Surely this policy/politics wordplay is a fundamental quality of democracy. Every decision our leaders make is supposed to reflect our general will; when they make a policy shift, it’s their job to convince us it’s the right one, and slogans are far more tenacious than facts. As California goes bankrupt after years of the same tax-and-spend policies, Obama has begun on a national scale, his challenge to sway the American public towards big government will become harder. For better or worse, I think he’s got the chops.