Even Maureen Dowd is getting sick of Barack Obama’s distinctive habit of striking poses of being holier-than-thou and more-intelligent-than-thou.

President Obama proved himself a great segue artist Friday, as he smoothly glided from his previously unassailable position on the matter of surveillance to his new unassailable position on the matter of surveillance.

There is no moral high ground that he does not seek to occupy. As with drones and gay marriage, he seems peeved that we were insufficiently patient with his own private study of the matter. Why won’t the country agree to entrust itself to his fine mind?

Judging by MoDo, the reek of Obama-esque sanctimony and self-congratulation has put liberals off their feed and induced a yearning on the political left for a return to the naughtier-than-thou Clintons. Dowd is already wishfully addressing Hillary as “Madam President.”

Yet while Barry is in the thick of it, the air is thick with Hillary. From the sidelines, she is soaking up a disproportionate amount of attention and energy, as though she were already Madam President.

She is supposed to be resting and off making $200,000 speeches, but instead she’s around every political corner.

The cicadas never showed up. But we can’t hear ourselves think here this summer over the roar of the Clinton machine. …

Many Democrats are hungry to make history again, and they see the first woman president as the natural successor to the first black president.

But in other ways, Hillary is not such a natural successor. The Clintons are ends-justify-the-means types with flexible boundaries about right and wrong, while the Obama mystique is the opposite. His White House runs on the idea that if you are virtuous and true and honorable, people will ultimately come to you. (An ethos that sometimes collides with political success.)

It’s odd that Obama, who once talked about being a transformational president, did not want to ensure that his allies and his aims were imprinted on the capital. Instead, he has teed up the ball for Hillary. Some of the excitement about Barack Obama was the prospect of making a clean start, after years of getting dragged into the Clintons’ dubious ethics and personal messes. Yet Obama ushered in the return of Clinton Inc. and gave it his blessing.

What he doesn’t seem to realize yet is that Hillary’s first term will be seen, not as a continuation of Obama, but as Bill Clinton’s third term.