If only Obama would say what he's never stopped saying. If only he would do what he's done.

Perhaps inevitably, at every political stress point liberals knock themselves out urging Obama to say precisely the things he's been saying nonstop since he first appeared on our horizon. The latest to succumb to the temptation is Michael Tomasky:

...politically I don’t think fairness is enough. Average Americans care about fairness, but not really all that much. People who have incomes comfortably above the median but who still aren’t rich are going to suspect that fairness means something is coming out of their hide. What they do care about, though, is growth. Everybody from Bill Gates to his janitor wants the economy to grow. So the case for these programs that Obama needs to make consistently going forward is not the case for their fairness, but the case that these policies, and not tax cuts for the wealthy or more draconian domestic budget cuts or less regulation, will promote growth.

Yup, if only Obama would say something like "in America, our prosperity has always risen from the bottom-up" and make the case that prosperity is not sustainable when inequality is rising. As he did in Raleigh, NH in June 2008:

We've done this because in America, our prosperity has always risen from the bottom-up. From the earliest days of our founding, it has been the hard work and ingenuity of our people that's served as the wellspring of our economic strength. That's why we built a system of free public high schools when we transitioned from a nation of farms to a nation of factories. That's why we sent my grandfather's generation to college, and declared a minimum wage for our workers, and promised to live in dignity after they retire through the creation of Social Security. That's why we've invested in the science and research that have led to new discoveries and entire new industries. And that's what this country will do again when I am President of the United States.

 And in Georgetown in April 2009:

What's Obama's peer group job creation ranking? Way better than 47th of 50

Romney's job creation record as governor of Massachusetts bears a striking -- if superficial -- resemblance to Obama's as President: a first year of job losses followed by three years of weak growth (actually, for Romney, a rather strong final year following two near-flat years).

Romney has been attacking Obama's job creation record since...forever.  You know the drill: Obama made the recession worse, Obama isn't working, nearly a million jobs lost on his watch.  This week, as the Obama team turns the tables and broadcasts that Massachusetts ranked 47th out of 50 states in job growth during Romney's tenure, the Romney camp finds an excuse: you can't blame him for first-year job losses. Of course, if you give Obama that pass, the country has gained nearly 4 million jobs on his watch.  Or, as Michael Tomasky calculated: excluding each executive's first year, and through April of their fourth year, Obama has presided over 2.35% job growth, Romney over 1.9%.

Hence, two Obama spox pounced this morning on Twitter:

Jim Messina: Romney economics: Under Romney, MA fell to 47th out of 50 on job creation. Under POTUS, we see 27 months of private-sector job growth.

Stephanie Cutter: Romney campaign undercut its entire strategy by arguing that he inherited bad economy so 1st yr shouldn't be counted.

What's needed to concentrate fire, it seems to me, is an apples-to-apples comparison to Romney's 47/50 ranking, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. In reality, any local economy in any given period is sui generis; Rick Perry is not a "better" job creator than Mitt Romney. But with Romney shamelessly manipulating the stats to attack Obama, it's fair to come up with a "peer group" for the US during Obama's term.  And what could be fairer than the OECD, which includes Korea, unemployment rate 3.7% at present, and Japan, clocking in at  4.5%?  So let's have a look.

Attention, Tomasky: Obama always links prosperity to fairness

Michael Tomasky warns that there's a missing link in Obama's newfound populism: while he is talking to the American people about fairness, Republicans keep talking (misleadingly) about growth.  Democrats need to win the argument about growth, because growth means jobs. And that means arguing explicitly that their policies will lead not just to shared prosperity, but to more prosperity:

What Obama needs to do more forcefully is make the next step of the argument by answering the questions: Why must fairness be restored? What will it lead to? To liberals, it’s enough that it will lead to a fairer society. Therefore, it doesn’t even occur to many liberals that the “What will it lead to?” question even needs to be answered. A fairer society is enough. But for many Americans, it’s not enough. A fairer society is fine, they think, if we can afford it. But what these Americans want is a society where there are lots of good jobs. A prosperous society. So what Obama and his speechwriters should be hoping people summarizing his speeches would say is something like: he’s for building up the middle class and making the rich pay more because things are out of whack and unfair, and because doing so will create a more prosperous society. That’s the missing piece.

I'm afraid that the missing piece is a chimera. Democrats cannot get it out of their heads that Obama just is not saying the right things. Perhaps he and his administration don't drive them home with the right sound bytes or repetitiveness -- or perhaps a populace just will not hear when unemployment is north of 8%.  Perhaps, too, Obama went semi-mute for a few months in 2011 (May to September at most) on the broad economic themes he's been repeating throughout his career on the national stage. But as long as I've been listening to the man (and reading his books and speeches), Obama has insisted that fairness and prosperity are hand-in-glove -- and that prosperity that is not broadly shared, that accrues mainly to a wealthy minority, has repeatedly (1890s, 1920s, noughties) proved unsustainable.

Voters: compromise good, capitulation bad

When the first polls came in after the lopsided debt ceiling deal and subsequent stock market tumble, Jonathan Chait billed the budget deal Obama's Katrina. 

That rang ominously true to me. Shortly afterward, my sister-in-law, a compassionate Democrat and social worker who stumped with my wife and me* for Obama in ''08, told me tenderly that people were wondering whether Obama was strong enough to be president.  Oh oh... Hence, when apparently anomalous polls found that Americans disapproved of Obama's handling of the economy while approving of most of the proposals in his jobs plan, it seemed plain to me that Obama was being punished not for advocating the wrong policies but for failing to put his policies across.

Now here is Michael Tomasky quoting Democratic pollster Guy Molyneux affirming the notion that Obama is suffering from perceived weaknes. Citing  Kaiser Family Foundation polling (though the article provides no actual data on this point),  Molyneux tells Tomasky

An implacable conciliator

Drew Westen's full-fronted assault on President Obama's performance, rhetoric and character riveted liberal America.  To my mind, Westen core charges have been definitively refudiated. Westen idealized and mischaracterized FDR, vastly overestimated the power of presidential rhetoric, short-changed Obama's legislative accomplishments, ignored what he actually said in his speeches and impugned his motives without any meaningful discussion or evidence.

Westen did, however, touch a  raw nerve in progressives frustrated by Obama's refusal to acknowledge that Republicans have not dealt with him in good faith, and by his endlessly proffered willingness to engage with them under the assumption that they are willing to compromise to find solutions to the country's problems. Michael Tomasky offers a more substantive critique than Westen's of this conciliatory approach to leadership.  While acknowledging a variety of possible contributory causes, Tomasky focuses on Obama's political philosophy -- which is easily verifiable in his writing, speeches and engagement with Congress:

An implacable conciliator

Drew Westen's full-fronted assault on President Obama's performance, rhetoric and character riveted liberal America.  To my mind, Westen core charges have been definitively refudiated. Westen idealized and mischaracterized FDR, vastly overestimated the power of presidential rhetoric, short-changed Obama's legislative accomplishments, ignored what he actually said in his speeches and impugned his motives without any meaningful discussion or evidence.

Westen did, however, touch a  raw nerve in progressives frustrated by Obama's refusal to acknowledge that Republicans have not dealt with him in good faith, and by his endlessly proffered willingness to engage with them under the assumption that they are willing to compromise to find solutions to the country's problems. Michael Tomasky offers a more substantive critique than Westen's of this conciliatory approach to leadership.  While acknowledging a variety of possible contributory causes, Tomasky focuses on Obama's political philosophy -- which is easily verifiable in his writing, speeches and engagement with Congress:

A lover of fairy tales casts Obama as villain-in-chief

This one is going to hurt.

In what seems like a bid to definitively cement the perceptions of progressives disappointed in Obama, psychologist Drew Westen, a student of the alleged power of stories to shape political perception, has put together his own master narrative about Obama -- a merciless tale of presidential FAIL. It's a quadruple-length op-ed (over 3000 words) on the front page of The New York Times' Sunday Review section -- a rhetorical nuke dropped on ground zero in the liberal heartland.

Westen is a good storyteller. There is real force to many of his charges. But modeling what he says Obama should have done, he  tells a simplified morality tale -- highly selective, with a clear villain, and in some points demonstrably false. He makes copious use of political cliches about messaging that fail to take into account the degree to which economic conditions shape audience reception of a politician's message. Founded on the alleged timidity of the 2009 stimulus, his story fails to engage the question of whether Obama could have got a larger stimulus through Congress. And in the end, it devolves into an ad hominem attack with recourse to cheap psychologizing (notwithstanding Westen's protestations of scientific detachment) and unfounded impugning of motive.