President Obama´s mishandling of the Republican-generated debt-ceiling crisis cannot be excused by comparing his fine motives and principles, which have the support of most Americans, with the Republicans´ increasingly wild zealotry.

The question facing us isn't who's the most wise, reasonable, or even sane. It's how presidential leadership differs from mediation in moments of crisis.

I'm not the one to recommend a specific bold strategy for the president. But congressional Democrats have failed abysmally to insist on the agenda that most Americans really want (as Stanley Greenberg showed clearly in Sunday's New York Times.)

We can and should insist on holding Obama to a standard of leadership that requires telling the whole truth about conservative Republicans´ 30-year-long, many-staged coup d'état, which I outlined here at some length last week (in an essay felicitously titled "Debt-Crisis Greedheads, Fountainheads, Godheads, Airheads, and the Rest of Us.") That essay is my best attempt, while traveling, to characterize the situation we're facing.

Leadership can no longer suppress the truth to facilitate mediation, as Obama has done by praising the hostage takers´ patriotism and hoping they'll give a little.

He has let them win by letting them shift the discourse and playing field. That's unacceptable in a leader at a time like this. It was unacceptable to Abraham Lincoln, complicated a thinker as he was, and to Teddy Roosevelt, flawed and contradictory as he could be. It was unacceptable to Franklin D. Roosevelt when he said, in Madison Square Garden in 1936, "The bankers of America hate me. And I welcome their hatred." And it was unacceptable to "Give em Hell Harry" Truman when he barnstormed the country in 1948, denouncing the ´´Do-nothing Republican Congress.´´

Where is Obama´s leadership as the public educator and truth-teller the country needs? He won't have Republicans where he wants them if he can't rally the larger part of the country that opposes their plans.