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:

Meet the new Obama -- same (mostly) as the Old Obama

Yesterday, I sought to demonstrate that Obama was simply reverting to form in his second inaugural address by equating liberal priorities with the nation's founding principles and historical development. He did so day in and day out in 2008; the notion that liberal policy prescriptions would enable the country to continue forming "a more perfect union" was the basis of his campaign. I professed myself astonished that anyone would be surprised by his using this framework -- grounding his policies in the Declaration of Independence -- in his Second Inaugural.

Lest anyone conclude that Obama the defender of liberal priorities went into remission for four years, let's extend the 'rhetoric retrospective' back from the most recent past. Take, for example, Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention last September -- a widely panned speech that to my ear was more forceful, more caustic, and more conceptually resonant than yesterday's inaugural.  At the DNC, Obama grounded his defense of government action to expand opportunity and strengthen the safety net and stimulate enterprise in -- you guessed it -- the Declaration of Independence:

As Americans, we believe we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights – rights that no man or government can take away. We insist on personal responsibility and we celebrate individual initiative. We’re not entitled to success. We have to earn it. We honor the strivers, the dreamers, the risk-takers who have always been the driving force behind our free enterprise system – the greatest engine of growth and prosperity the world has ever known.

But we also believe in something called citizenship – a word at the very heart of our founding, at the very essence of our democracy; the idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another, and to future generations....