The following was posted on April 13, when President Obama gave his big deficit-reduction speech. What would you change here to distinguish his leadership of the past three weeks from the following characterization of it in regard to the same matters four months ago? For an elaboration on what he was confronting then and now, see this post of last week.

President Obama drew luminous lines in the heavens in his speech on deficit reduction today, vowing to defend Medicaid as we know it and to re-open the unmentionable-in-Washington expectation that rich people give back "a little," as he put it, to the society that enabled them to become rich.

The speech was inadequate almost to the point of being empty because, once again, Obama could not or would not tell enough truth to "raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair," as George Washington put it.

The truth Obama did not tell the proverbial "American people," the truth he didn't try to rally more of us to address -- the truth he actually tried to disguise by informing us that Joe Biden will work with Congress and other naked emperors on his budget plan -- is that the federal government is bought and paid for by corporate and financial interests which, by law and their own corporate charters, are non- citizens with goals that dovetail only marginally, and often only perversely, with those of citizens.

This truth used to anger even Republicans such as Teddy Roosevelt. The question before us is why it doesn't bother Obama enough to mention it at a moment like this.

The question is why it doesn't bother him that even his own economic advisers, let alone the corporate-welfare lobbyists who infest and run Congress, will do -- to the America which he dared to say that he's defending -- what termites will do to a building, leaving his edifice, indeed, a castle in the sky.

Obama did not tell the proverbial American people that we are in the midst of what Washington Monthly editor Paul Glastris has called a "creeping coup d'etat." Its moves have included the Citizens United ruling, which strengthens the for-profit corporate writ in elections; the coordinated attack by Republican governors on public-sector unions as the entities that other workers should blame for their dispossession; and the Republican congressional delegation's framing of the budget terrain in Washington.

The entities driving these moves are determined - as former Senator Jesse Helms' adviser James Lucier told Elizabeth Drew after Ronald Reagan's 1980 election -- to bring the country back to the Gilded Age imperialism of President William McKinley.

After McKinley was assassinated in 1901, the country began to take a different turn under this vice president Theodore Roosevelt. While no less an imperialist than McKinley, TR was independent-minded and bold enough to denounce the country's "malefactors of great wealth" and to admonish the Congress (and future Supreme Court justifiers like Anthony Kennedy and John Roberts) that "All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law; directors should not be permitted to use stockholders' money for such purposes; and, moreover, a prohibition of this kind would be... an effective method of stopping the evils aimed at in corrupt practices acts."

Judged now by the standards raised by the Roosevelts, Obama, who ran promising "Change we can believe in," is such an empty suit that it's a wonder he still expects today's speech to be believed. He accomplished less than zero by crooning bipartisan ditties alongside a few "strong" criticisms of the Republican congressional budget proposals and of the unbending left wing of his own party as if it were as powerful as the Tea Party!.

The truth he couldn't or wouldn't tell is that both parties are casino-finance, corporate-welfare shills and that the American economy as much as the American welfare state will be their casualties, because, again, the corporations that own them are, by law and charter, mindless in any serious civic and social sense - incapable of considering the good of the country because they're truly forbidden to consider it. That's why they have to be regulated and reined in and why they certainly should direct federal budgeting.

I'll be making this argument at greater length before long, but Obama's speech is an occasion to draw a line now, not the sky, but in the political dirt. So here goes: I'm sure that I will end up voting for Obama in 2012, but I will not work for him.

And if his supporters and neo-liberal enablers still think they can wag admonishing fingers at me as an unreconstructed, anti-capitalist Marxist, they're not reading Joseph Stiglitz in Vanity Fair, and they're in for a surprise.

Sure, the world has changed a lot since the days of the two Roosevelts. But it has also changed since 2008, and if Obama can't broaden and deepen his constituency with a higher truth content, good luck to him and to all of us.