President Barack Obama has been onstage with Mitt Romney now for a collective three hours and has yet to enunciate anything within hailing distance of a second-term agenda.

He wants to “win the future” — he just doesn’t have a very clear idea about how to do it. His slogan is “forward,” but his campaign is unmistakably backward-looking. His case for re-election has about as much to do with the last four years of the Bush administration as it does the next four years of the prospective second Obama administration.