Last night’s appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno went about as well as normal for Barack Obama, apparently. 

Leno brought up some uncomfortable topics, taking the President off of his economic campaign speech, and into unchartered waters — literally, as Joe Biden would say. When pressed about the NSA’s widespread collection of domestic telephone and Internet records, Obama insisted that the NSA wasn’t spying on Americans … just keeping their records handy, or something: President Obama on Tuesday defended the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance programs in a wide-ranging interview on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.