Any day now, a glossy savant like David Brooks or Nicholas Lemann will sigh theatrically that almost no Democratic nominee - think of McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, and maybe Obama - has played rough and dirty enough when it counted. Only Bill and Hillary showed the shameless determination it takes to win. Why, oh why, the pundits will ask, have so many Democrats left us looking for the fire in their bellies?

The answer has little to do with the candidates themselves being too innocent, nuanced, confused, or weak, as the licensed cynics often pretend. Even Slick Willie won in 1992 thanks partly to Ross Perot. The Democrats' problem is political and economic, long before it's psychological. Focusing on candidates' personal weaknesses and assessing vice-presidential nominees as steroids only dodges the deeper truth that most of us aren't free enough to get candidates we deserve - or to bring the best out of them when we do.

Sometimes followers have to lead leaders, as Theda Skocpol noted here two days ago, to resounding applause. But what are we ready to demand that Obama fight for?

The problem everyone sidesteps is that Democrats are entangled as inextricably as Republicans in the thinking and practices of the corporate welfare state and its consumer-marketing juggernaut that are destroying the American republic.

Republicans, though, actually celebrate America's becoming a global market empire in a national-security regime. So they can easily cast Democrats as hypocrites for vowing to lead us from the fleshpots of our deepening slavery -- with its pseudo-escapes and awful addictions -- into a hard wilderness of painful reform on the way to a civic-republican promised land.

Democrats aren't really ready to lead us into that wilderness, not least because we, their supporters, aren't ready to go! We like to feel better by hearing them promise to take Republicans there! No wonder we settle for nominees who aren't really angry in the right ways.

I don't think we should rouse the temperamental kind of anger for which McCain is known and which a black candidate like Obama daren't show in a campaign. I don't even crave the deeper, personal anger without which Dukakis looked so hapless in the headlights of Bernard Shaw's indecent question about what he'd do if Kitty Dukakis were raped, or the anger without which John Kerry took Swift-Boat and wind-surfer derision lying down.

That kind of anger certainly does have its uses: Kerry should have back hit hard on Bush's indisputable draft-dodging, and his campaign should have re-broadcast relentlessly a few choice swaggers and lines from Bush's flight-deck "Mission Accomplished" speech. Similarly, Obama, in one of the upcoming debates and then in ads 24/7, should humiliate McCain with scenes of him in Nevada in 2004 offering worshipful accolades and a gross bear hug to the same George W. Bush whose operatives had disparaged and humiliated McCain four years before with ugly rumors about his adopted daughter.

But the anger we really need if we want to do more than win elections that produce landfills of disillusionment involves a determination deeper and even darker than what goes into a candidate's personal pride. The closest I've seen Obama come to posing a serious challenge borne of the clean anger I'm talking about came in his answer to Rick Warren's query about what he'd tell the American people if he weren't worrying about political consequences.

Obama answered that solving the energy crisis will require big sacrifices and lifestyle changes from everyone, sacrifices equivalent to those made by children of the Depression and World War II; now it's our turn to sacrifice for future generations as Americans of the 1930s and '40s did for us.

The audience applauded, but are they or we really ready? If not, Obama won't be. The fault will be not in our political stars but in ourselves.

I always have to say at this point that what I'm trying to pull out of Obama and the rest of us is not a Marxist revolution, class war, or some post-capitalist utopia we can win by singing Kumbaya or coming home to Jesus.

Such charges are always made by the Brookses, Lemanns, and other self-appointed monitors of liberal discourse every time a critic of capitalism opens his mouth. The apologists' hackles rise faster than their paychecks from conglomerate publishers and elite non-profit corporations whenever a Bill Moyers, William Greider, Thomas Frank, Michael Moore, or other dissenter speaks.

But one needn't agree with everything critics of corporate capitalism say to see that the current system's rising economic and psychological crises demand a reckoning we aren't getting even from neoliberals such as Fareed Zakaria, Thomas Freedman, and others who write around and around the problem without really naming it.

The problem is American and global corporate capitalism, which are no longer what you were told they were! Most of us uphold a taboo against saying so. The taboo owes almost as much to the rigidities of the Marxist, especially Stalinist, old left, not to mention the fatuities of the New and post-modernist lefts, as it does to the triumphs, repressions and seductions of the corporate state itself. But the taboo can and must be broken without returning to any of that.

There is an indigenous, civic-republican American leftist tradition, of Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas, of Moyers, Greider, and, in some respects, John Kenneth Galbraith and James Galbraith, among others. It began before the wrong lefts I've mentioned. We need to recover it to keep the republic.

When Obama says "change will be hard," is this what he means? It had better be, even if it is not what Robert Rubin means. The civic-republican leftist tradition does not oppose entrepreneurial capitalism in free markets. It understands that capitalism, in its proper time and place, liberates people from tribalistic blood feuds and ancient superstitions and generates the wealth a society needs to move forward.

But precisely because the American civic-republican tradition values capitalism, it is quick to notice when corporations and seceding elites, parading under the banners of free markets, disrupt, destroy, and dissolve the entrepreneurial and civic wellsprings of republican freedom into the prerogatives of a global ruling class that's unaccountable to any polity or moral code.

Does Obama notice, too? Or is he a neoliberal like Zakaria or Friedman, who gloss the civic perils of capitalism as we know it? It's a question I've raised about Obama here before, arguing that the answer depends largely on us.

Would a majority of the American people even allow Obama to be better than a neoliberal? Any serious critic of corporate capital would face insurmountable odds against its dependants, disgruntled though they are, and against Pharoah's phalanxes of vain but increasingly desperate apologists, whose own bottomless hypocrisies and fatuities align them only too well with the vast, obese swath of American casualties of the present dispensation.

Those Americans want certitudes, not confusion, confirmation of life as it is, not summonses to a more strenuous life on a hard road. They crave the appearance of clarity and conviction in leaders, even if substantively it's anchored only in a pathetic notion that this leader would have beer with you or sit your grandchildren comfortably on his knee.

In a country that doesn't want to know, the man of blind clarity is king. The one-eyed man is hapless, and the clear-eyed man is crucified.

But I still dream of a different country: The next time Obama tells a crowd, "I love you back" - in Denver, perhaps - I dream of a Bruce Springsteen type with a megaphone getting up and saying, "No, man, we don't want you to love us back; we want you to fight for us!" And I dream of the crowd joining him in chanting, "Fight for us! Fight for us!," showing a clean anger and strength that might fluster Obama a little but also rouse in him a cleaner, more determined anger than even he had realized was there.

From that kind of determination, running from the candidate's supporters to him, not the other way 'round, would come Obama's strength to go for the political jugular of the blind man who is his opponent, the man who hugged Bush, wears $500 shoes, has more than few homes, cheats with lobbyists, and hasn't a clue about how capitalism works best and how it has gone wrong.

At this point, loving him back means pushing him back. This is no time for fainteartedness. As a hymn from Obama's own Congregational tradition warns:

Who so beset him 'round
With dismal stories
Do but themselves confound;
His strength the more is.
No foe shall stay his might
Though he with giants fight
He will make good his right
To be a Pilgrim.

But Obama's strength from here to November won't be "the more" on faith alone. It can't grow unless more followers point the leader in the right direction. Theda Skocpol is right. As Ben Franklin told the bystander who asked what kind of government the delegates to Philadelphia's Constitutional Convention were preparing: "A republic, if you can keep it."