A month ago, many in the Washington commentariat belittled Drew Westen's warning to Barack Obama to become a better - or even a Great - communicator and an action-oriented leader in this economic and political crisis if he means to lead the country out of it, let alone get himself re-elected.

Obama seems to have gotten Westen's message. But, as everyone knows who's followed these columns, the initial reaction to that same message by Jonathan Chait, Fareed Zakaria, and other keepers of the Washington Beltway world-view, or Beltanschauung, reminded me of those cartoons of humans and dogs that contrast "What we say" with "What they hear."

You'll recall that Chait accused Westen of selling liberals the "irresistible delusion" that "every known impediment to the legislative process--special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion-- are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech."

Very stirring rhetoric. At least, Zakaria was stirred by it. Watch him react to Westen, quoting Chait, on this unintentionally hilarious two-minute CNN clip.

But what Obama's more enlightened critics -- from Westen to Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, Joseph Stiglitz, Jared Bernstein, Robert Shiller, and others -- were actually saying, as I pointed out at the time, was that Obama should give a big speech, followed by many other speeches, that would:

a) open a hard fight for substantive jobs programs, knowing full well that his opponents will vote them down and getting them clearly on record doing so; and, then, he would:

b) lambaste the do-nothing Congress and tell Americans the truth about what the global casino-finance, corporate-welfare, consumer-defrauding juggernaut that controls this Congress has been doing to their jobs.

Well! Now, against Zakaria's and Chait's advice, Obama has done what others of us called for -- or nearly so, as I'll explain -- and he's promised to take it "to every corner of the country." So maybe we'll see a "Give 'em Hell Barry" like the "Give 'em Hell Harry" Truman of 1948, who won a tight re-election after denouncing the "do-nothing Congress" on a nation-wide tour.

I say, "maybe." Obama's neo-liberal apologists said this couldn't and shouldn't happen. Might they yet be proved right?

Obama hasn't done everything that Westen or his other left-of-center critics would have liked. He hasn't told the country that we don't really have Adam Smith's "free market" capitalism anymore -- the kind that's been sold to us since 1980 by a multi-billion-dollar barrage of tutorials and assurances from conservative think tanks and media.

Compared to that, we critics of the consequent economic and political anarchy and decline aren't zealots, let alone utopians, Communists, or magic-wand wavers. we're not even "L-word" liberals of Zakaria's and Chait's imaginings.

And the present dispensation isn't "The Best of All Possible Worlds" that the much-beloved medley of the orchestra of high-minded Beltway opinion assures us it is. It's a global wrecking ball that needs to be grasped and guided somehow by republics and trans-national bodies with some democratic base, and not always guided as financiers and CEOs and even bond-holders want it to be.

"A President can't say that!", cry the Beltanschauung realists, and, indeed, Obama didn't say it. His base-rousing rhetoric left room for compromises -- some necessary and even wise, others that duck basic truths, blur the solutions, and so may presage deeper disappointment.

The likelihood of any president telling more of the truth than Obama told in the speech would be greater if Beltway writers would tell more of the truth themselves, instead of abdicating their intellectual freedoms and responsibilities and sounding like what C. Wright Mills called "crackpot realists" -- insiders and power-groupies who can always be relied on to dismiss others who are telling the truth already.

Let me repeat another part of the truth that no one's been ready tell: Pasting Zakaria's and Obama's faces on the global wrecking ball won't humanize it or save the republic. You can't clothe injustice in raiments of "diversity" and assume that that will make it just. That would be waving a magic wand.

Obama knows this. But he can't say it.