Moments ago, in this morning's press conference, President Obama was visibly indignant and as to close to manifestly incensed about the GOP's debt-talks intransigence as the president temperamentally can get.
It was a thing of beauty: "Call me naive," he said, but he believed that "leaders are going to lead" and "my expectation is they'll do the responsible thing" -- in contrast to the GOP's heretofore maniacal insistence that the middle class take yet more budget hits while billionaires, hedge-fund managers and corporate-jet owners glide through the debt-resolution talks unscathed.
Yet more intriguing, to me, was that in his opening, prepared comments, Obama emphasized not only the acute pain experienced by America's middle class from the Great Recession, but its enduring, pre-2007 socioeconomic challenges. The palpable reelection campaign message: another Obama presidential term will spell a judicious restructuring of America's intrinsically debilitated economy. His first term has been pragmatically limited to overcoming the GOP's ideological insanities and consequent material desolation, Obama seemed to be saying, but his next term will be about rebuilding -- fundamentally -- from the bottom up.
That, anyway, was the way I read it -- I gleaned a touch of the Kennedyesque. Folks, just get me through the unavoidable pragmatisms of a first term, which always requires concessions to certain vigorous political realities that a second term does not. That lofty idealism demanded by the progressives will have to wait, but the loftiness will indeed come.