When you're flat for days in a hospital bed as surgical cuts on your throat heal, things clarify.

Soon enough, sure enough, it happened. By the end of my stay, Barack Obama, New Jersey's Chris Christie and Robert McDonnell of Virginia — the president and two recently disgraced governors — seemed to step out of "Inside Llewyn Davis." Have you seen it? It's the Joel and Ethan Coen homage to folk singers scene of the early 1960s, like Dave Von Ronk, Bob Dylan and others in Greenwich Village.

More intriguing than my condition was how the daily churn yielded insights into political figures as if they were pre-cut characters from the same movie. At the end of the day, it's one fare-thee-well after another. Whatever their motivations and aspirations, politicians will leave us someday soon, like the cowboy who loves his old rodeo more than he loves me.

In a period piece set 50 years ago, I felt the beat fresh. That was an explosion of American expression, sound and lore in a few Village streets and midnight haunts. Amid the song track's train whistles, gambling men and rocky roads, folk songs and stories are stark stuff. Just like politics, it's life in its purest — or impurest — form.

Take Christie, sworn in for a second term, but still roiled by reports of his aides causing massive traffic jams on the George Washington Bridge. Of course, none of that made the inaugural speech. Nor were his 2016 presidential hopes present in the heavy room, as if they were hanging from the bridge. The Republican might have broken grim silences with the old melody: "I wouldn't mind the hanging, it's just the laying in the grave so long." Other than that, the inauguration was about as much as fun as a funeral.

Things were worse in Virginia, where McDonnell, another GOP darling, quickly fell on hard times — and may do hard time — in facing federal indictment charges. Court papers say he and his wife Maureen accepted about $165,000 in improper loans and gifts, including scads of designer clothes. Just days ago the man was governor of Virginia, central casting for "Mr. Jefferson's Capitol," good fodder for a song. He insists he has done nothing illegal as people roundly chuckle at his wife's email complaint: "We are broke ... and this Inaugural is killing us!!"

Like the song says, "Not a shirt on my back, not a penny to my name." "Five Hundred Miles" is the saddest song we know from the Peter, Paul and Mary book. The McDonnells give it rich new meaning.

Then we come to the angular, poised man in the White House. A president whose power is waning as he starts his sixth year, for example, is already working up his political obituary for David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. Here is an excerpt of Obama on his place in history:

"A little while later, as we were leaving the Oval Office and walking under the colonnade, Obama said, "I just wanted to add one thing. ... The president of the United States cannot remake our society, and that's probably a good thing." He paused yet again, always self-editing. "Not 'probably,' " he said. "It's definitely a good thing."

Summing up his legacy, Obama says, "We're part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right."

That paragraph doesn't make for a great song, does it? But for a president shoring up a world full of woe, it's a deft way to lower expectations he raised on the way in.

Maddening to many, Obama remains an enigma. In fact, the president and his wife made a "No New Friends" vow, Remnick reveals.

When Obama first burst in these parts, he was exactly like the young Dylan, the bard who charmed and dazzled "folks," (a word Obama uses often).

And when he leaves Washington on a winter day like this, it may feel like lines from "The Last Thing On My Mind."

"Are you going away with no word of farewell/

"Will there be not a trace left behind?/

"Well, I could have loved you better/

"I didn't mean to be unkind."

Bittersweet.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm, and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.