"Obama and the Democrats will move in seriously Progressive directions when and only when Progressives force the issues properly framed to the top of public discussion and drive them to it. Perhaps you can cite an instance in our history when it has happened any other way?"

Agreed.

lambert: "Where is this "politically achievable" to be found?"

It is found on a bridge in Selma, Alabama. It is found on a bus seat, at a lunch counter, in a public restroom and at a public drinking fountain. It is found in a rented hall in Jackson, Mississippi and on campuses where students face drawn guns and teargas and in streets filled with working people and the poor who are fed up and not willing to take it any more, and on the front porches of a thousand thousand doors where everyday people look other everyday people in the eyes and ask them to do the right thing.

Before Martin Luther King became the institution MLK he was a softspoken pastor at a church few have heard of, Dexter Avenue Baptist in Montgomery, and the quiet but well-regarded member of the Executive Committee of the NAACP. He was a volunteer activist, and never sought nor held an elected public office in his life. Most of the leadership and the entire cadre in the civil rights struggle came from simple roots, and few of them ever pursued an electoral route to power. A new political reality was achieved then, forced into being, by dint of numbers, by a groundswell of support from people literally in the streets, powerful enough to compel elected officials to not just accept it but embrace it.

In my view, it is extremely unlikely that those who have come to power through establishment-sanctioned pathways, whose power rests on the continuing goodwill of the establishment, are going to do things that actually challenge the hegemony of that same establishment. It may happen, but it is rare. Far more common, in our own history exclusively so, is for the people themselves to organize and rebel, in myriad ways, so forcefully that the establishment and its leadership recognize that continuing on their preferred path will result their own destruction.

Then, and only then, will the change we seek occur and that is the great lesson to be reflected upon today.

To repeat: Krugman is no fool, nor is he an establishment tool, and he certainly hasn't kicked anyone in the teeth. He has sounded a warning and made a call to arms, couched in the language of an academic speaking under cover of a pretense at comity; whosoever hath ears, let them hear.

[In anticipation of recent incorrect assertions being repeated, I absolutely make no disparagement of those who write as their preferred form of activism, or of blogs such as this one where liberal voices of many stripes can speak with freedom. Such activism is highly valuable, truly essential, and much to be admired and praised. I am, in fact, writing in advocacy at this blog; in so doing, can I also be disparaging of that which I do myself? Absurd.]

if you can.

He sometimes responds to to readers' comments/questions/criticisms.

There's lots of pressure to just support Obama, so let him know there are numbers who support doing what's the best thing, not just the political thing.

All the UHC bloggers here should make their thoughts known--with links to greatest hits posts...or something like that.

I'm heading over now to see where a comment might work.

at princeton