Paul Krugman:

This is, in short, a time when progressives ought to be driving home the idea that the right’s ideas don’t work, and never have.

It’s not just a matter of what happens in the next election. Mr. Clinton won his elections, but — as Mr. Obama correctly pointed out — he didn’t change America’s trajectory the way Reagan did. Why?

Well, I’d say that the great failure of the Clinton administration — more important even than its failure to achieve health care reform, though the two failures were closely related — was the fact that it didn’t change the narrative, a fact demonstrated by the way Republicans are still claiming to be the next Ronald Reagan.

Now progressives have been granted a second chance to argue that Reaganism is fundamentally wrong: once again, the vast majority of Americans think that the country is on the wrong track. But they won’t be able to make that argument if their political leaders, whatever they meant to convey, seem to be saying that Reagan had it right. [emphasis added]

Krugman really gets at two points that I’ve been trying to make quite well here. First, Republican ideas for governance, be it in economics, in foreign policy, in social policy, or military matters, just don’t work. Republican administrations leave the American people worse off. This should be cause for Democrats to stand up for what they believe in with pride.

Second, those people with the opportunities to speak out – our presidential candidates – have to be the ones leading by example. John Edwards’ message against corporate power is a good example of what it looks like when a proud Democrat stands up to conventional wisdom about how Republican ideas are right. Edwards has been so successful in that messaging that even Hillary Clinton is co-opting it, as evidence by this New York Times article.

Narratives change when the people with the power to change them step forward to do so. In the Democratic Party, the two people with the greatest power to change how our country thinks about policies are Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. I’m in agreement with Krugman that Obama’s Reagan comments are troubling (one of my first posts on this blog last week was on the subject). The narrative says Reagan was a good President and Reaganomics worked. But Reagan wasn’t a good President and his policies left our nation in a very bad place.

The best way for Obama or Clinton to frame their administration’s for being treated as successful is for them to take the time now to define what success does and does not look like. Who gets left behind? Who is enriched? What role will the government play in the rise or fall of the poverty rate in America? Answering these questions now by way to trashing everything the Reagan years stand for would be a good way to set the tone for how people can look to whatever either of these Democrats accomplish if the succeed in winning the White House. And if we can recognize this as an important opportunity to be seized by Democrats in 2008, it’s far easier to understand why Obama’s Reagan comments are not only troubling but damaging to his ability to succeed (and be treated as a success) if he is elected President.

Pam Spaulding reports on a speech Barack Obama gave today at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. This is the church where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached and it is one of the nation’s premier black churches. In the speech, Obama spoke to the black community, calling for them to stand up to bigotry within their community towards gays, Jews, and immigrants. Here’s a passage that stands out:

I’m talking about a moral deficit. I’m talking about an empathy deficit. I’m taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother’s keeper; we are our sister’s keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.

…

It’s not easy to stand in somebody else’s shoes. It’s not easy to see past our differences. We’ve all encountered this in our own lives. But what makes it even more difficult is that we have a politics in this country that seeks to drive us apart – that puts up walls between us.

…

For most of this country’s history, we in the African-American community have been at the receiving end of man’s inhumanity to man. And all of us understand intimately the insidious role that race still sometimes plays – on the job, in the schools, in our health care system, and in our criminal justice system.

And yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that none of our hands are entirely clean. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll acknowledge that our own community has not always been true to King’s vision of a beloved community.

We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them. The scourge of anti-Semitism has, at times, revealed itself in our community. For too long, some of us have seen immigrants as competitors for jobs instead of companions in the fight for opportunity.

Every day, our politics fuels and exploits this kind of division across all races and regions; across gender and party. It is played out on television. It is sensationalized by the media. And last week, it even crept into the campaign for President, with charges and counter-charges that served to obscure the issues instead of illuminating the critical choices we face as a nation.

Obama’s full remarks can be read here.

I’ll be honest and say that I don’t know enough about GLBT politics in the African American community to adequately offer my own analysis , so I’ll take Spaulding’s analysis as coming from an authority that I respect with knowledge on it. She writes:

These words are so necessary, but you can best believe he is the only candidate delivering speeches in honor of Dr. King who is willing to say it directly to members of the black community. This topic has always been a perceived as a third rail topic for the other leading Dem candidates, Clinton or Edwards — they are, like many whites, particularly if they see themselves as allies, dread being seen as pointing out the evils and hypocrisy of such bigotry in the black faith community, even as wrong and tragic as it is on its face.

What I see in this and what I hope I can continue to see from Obama is that he recognized that he has a special platform to speak to an important issue and he used took it. I say that not exclusively in reference to his race or how he, as Spaulding says, he is singularly suited to deliver this message to the black community. Rather, for me the importance is in Obama using his platform as a presidential candidate to do more than could be done by people without the privilege of being a front running presidential candidate.

Sometimes leadership means looking around and recognizing that more people will listen to you than to anyone else, that your words will change the national debate, and that it’s your time to step forward and use your unique opportunity to lead before you enter the White House. Barack Obama did that today. I hope he continues to do it on many other issues before many other communities.

I’ll even suggest one for him: join Chris Dodd to filibuster retroactive immunity if it comes before the Senate this week.

This may be the most devastating use of the asterisk I’ve ever seen. Paul Krugman begins a post on his blog comparing entrepreneurship during the Reagan and Clinton years with this line:

One thing that struck me about Obama’s apparent assertion that Reaganism represented a justified reaction against the excesses of liberalism.*

Where does that asterisk lead?

*In my next life I want to have legions of devoted followers who will fiercely declare that I didn’t really mean what I seem to have said, and that anyone who thinks I did must be a paid shill.

Ouch.

Let me propose The Krugman Rule, which is, if you are a left leaning Democratic candidate and you pick a fight with Paul Krugman, you will lose that fight badly.