Obama offered an impassioned defense of liberal values in yesterday's speech, but the specifics were far less inspiring.
"You campaign in poetry and govern in prose" is a pretty fair adage for delineating the poles of political life, and it most surely delineates the poles of Barack Obama's presidency. Few presidents have been able to evoke visions of a decent society as well as he, and particularly as well as he did in his speech yesterday afternoon at George Washington University. The America that Obama argued for is a socially cohesive America, a land where we rise and fall together as beneficiaries not only of our own labors but of the labors of others and the collective labors of the nation, fostered, funded and in some cases performed by its government.
In September, 2009 Atlantic Monthly named 
