Tristero, writing at Hullabaloo, has a different take on Krugman’s column today on Obama and reminding people that Republicans are wrong:

Krugman’s final point is that all the Dem candidates are missing an excellent opportunity to debunk the rightwing myths that have made it so difficult for liberal, Democratic, and even moderate candidates to wield national influence. I think that is absolutely true. But that is far more difficult for a serious national candidate to do than it is to say. Let’s not forget that in Krugman’s own paper serious people don’t include those favoring withdrawal from Iraq. That means that most of the world, including its political and cultural leaders, do not hold realistic-enough views on Iraq to be worthy of Mr. Gordon’s keen attention.

In other words, the “acceptable” mainstream discourse really is, as the liberal blogosphere has argued since time immemorial, incredibly restricted. It is doubtful that any potential candidate who criticized St. Ron of Hollywood would ever be granted the standing the press has willingly accorded the less-than-worthless Huckabee. To criticize Reagan is the height of unseriousness.

Of course, I’m not saying that’s appropriate. I’m saying that is how corrupted and claustrophobic our public discourse has become. I don’t think any candidate who dared to bash Reagan would receive that much coverage – good, bad, or indifferent. S/he’d be ignored. [emphasis added]

As I see it, Tristero’s point is that criticizing Obama for not taking his unique opportunity as a presidential candidate to reshape how America thinks about the Reagan years is unfair because while Obama should do this, he might lose his veneer of seriousness with the press if it did so. A less charitable reading of this would be that speaking truth to power is hard, so Obama is justified for not doing it. I’m glad Tristero isn’t saying that this is “appropriate,” because I think it’s an awful way for a leader to assess how and when he speaks on a subject.

I think Tristero is probably right about the negative response any criticism of Reagan would receive from the press. But stepping back from the blogger argument about how the media Heathers decide what’s OK and not OK for people to say before they wander off into Kucinich land, I think our concern in this instance should be focused more on the power that a “serious national candidate” has to do and say things that challenge conventional wisdom.

If Barack Obama can’t stand up and speak out on Reagan with his unique platform as a front-running presidential candidate, who ever will be able to? The standards of decorum usually prevent sitting presidents from bashing previous presidents, so don’t expect any ground changing critique of Reagan to come from Obama once he’s in office.

All I’m looking for – and I think Krugman, too – is leadership from Obama. We have a whopping two people in this country that we as progressives and Democrats can hang our hats on to see change brought at the highest levels. Asking Obama and Clinton to act like leaders is not a huge request to put at the feet of people who aim to lead our whole country.

Yesterday Obama proved that he is capable of speaking truth to an audience that may not receive it well. Pam Spaulding at her blog and Stephanie Hunt in the comment here, among others, have suggested that doing so could actually hurt Obama’s chances to win votes in South Carolina. That is as tangible a consequence, if it materializes, as facing a skeptical press.

Tristero is right, there is risk to challenging the conventional wisdom about Ronald Reagan, most of which plays out in how the press will respond to such heresy. But asking someone who purports to be a transformational leader to actually stand up and lead in a transformational way is not only a reasonable request, but a predictable one. Being a leader means doing hard things because they’re the right thing to do and effectively no one else in America has been afforded the same set of tools to speak out on an issue.

I fundamentally disagree with Tristero that it is “far more difficult for a serious national candidate to do than it is to say.” Sure, there will be blowback, but we’re talking about someone who wants to be President of the United States. A national candidate has the microphone needed to say something on a subject that changes the way people think about that issue. A House or Senate candidate can’t do that. Obama has a legion of press that record and replay every word he utters. Every statement or criticism of a bold faced name by Obama becomes a swirling media story that commands attention. If there is someone better suited to challenge the status quo and have the country listen than Barack Obama, I look forward to finding out who that person is.

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.