Influenced by the Bard

In addition to having left the hacks' heads spinning with long and often complex answers (for which they are out of practice), Barack Obama had an interesting choice of phrase at the start of his first press conference: referring to the current period as "the winter of our hardship". It seems like an obvious attempt to avoid a direct Richard III reference to the "winter of our discontent", which for one thing is already over by the time that it's referred to in the play.