Hillary Clinton, genuinely funny and admiration-generating in a stint this week with two of Australia's broadcast comics, Hamish and Andy...Barack Obama, at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta, making a speech about democracy in Indonesia, and a reprise on last year's appeal to Islam -- but also daring to talk a little bit in the Bahasa Indonesia ("language of Indonesia") he heard around him as a child.

It’s a colossal shame that presidential life has no magic rewind button, for if it did—and we could whirr ourselves back to June 2009—we’d have had Barack Hussein Obama skip Pharaonic old Cairo, city of the ghastly Hosni Mubarak and a tightly coiled hatred of the West, and deliver his first major speech to a Muslim nation in Indonesia...

Now that President Barack Obama has concluded his $200 million per day trip to India (just kidding—that risible far right-wing canard has been thoroughly debunked), it’s a good moment for some initial thoughts about the soft power dimensions of the episode.

The two leaders said their countries would expand their relationship in trade and investment, education, energy, climate and the environment, security, and democratization. Obama praised Indonesia for having created a "genuine democracy" with a very diverse population, and said other Southeast Asian countries could learn from it.

It’s a colossal shame that presidential life has no magic rewind button, for if it did—and we could whirr ourselves back to June 2009—we’d have had Barack Hussein Obama skip Pharaonic old Cairo, city of the ghastly Hosni Mubarak and a tightly coiled hatred of the West, and deliver his first major speech to a Muslim nation in Indonesia...

In a much-anticipated speech focusing on development, democracy and religion, President Obama sought on Wednesday to strengthen America’s ties with Indonesia, a rising Asian power with the world’s largest Muslim population. But his intended audience was also elsewhere in the Muslim world, especially in the Middle East...

President Obama arrives today in Indonesia, a country he knows well, where he lived for part of his childhood and is extremely popular. Indonesia is on the other side of the world, 12,000 miles from Washington, and most Americans know little about it. So they may not appreciate the importance of the president's visit as an opportunity to cement a closer relationship with an ally in the fight against Islamist extremism.

As he finally makes it to Jakarta, it's worth noting just how much Indonesia, the country that considers him a native son, loves all things Obama. Case in point: the Barack Obama reality show.