I winced, but I didn’t bother to argue. Certainly I remember the racist abuse Hank Aaron endured when he broke Babe Ruth’s lifetime home run record in 1974, and there’s no denying black players face slights that whites don’t. But if baseball managers refuse to let Bonds “do it” — by walking him more, rather than challenging him — it will of course have nothing to do with race. The Giants are in the heat of a race for the post-season, just like Sosa’s Cubs were in 1998, while McGwire’s third-place St. Louis Cardinals were in a race to get home to their golf clubs.

It’s always sad to me when race shows up where it’s irrelevant, and I’m convinced it’s irrelevant in this year’s thrilling home run chase. I’ve never thought race had much to do with Bonds’ reputation for churlishness, either. He is rude to reporters, and sometimes to fans as well. But I thought about those black baseball conspiracy theorists when I read Rick Reilly’s Sports Illustrated column blasting the Giants superstar last week, and the media firestorm that followed. Reilly reamed Bonds for his surliness, his focus on his own stats and his trademark failure to run out ground balls. What gave the piece rare power was Reilly’s liberal quoting of National League MVP Jeff Kent, who blasted his superstar teammate.

“On the field, we’re fine, but off the field, I don’t care about Barry and Barry doesn’t care about me. Or anybody else,” Kent told Reilly. “He doesn’t answer questions. He palms everybody off on us, so we have to do his talking for him. But you get used to it. Barry does a lot of questionable things … I was raised to be a team guy, and I am, but Barry’s Barry. It took me two years to learn to live with it, but I learned.”

Reilly’s criticism of Bonds was bad enough, but Kent’s made the S.I. piece a national sports scandal. Still, I was struck by the fact that few sportswriters blasted Kent for breaching his own supposed “team-first” ethics by attacking a teammate, in the heat of a pennant race no less. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Scott Ostler took a few mild potshots, in two mostly humorous columns, and the paper’s Bruce Jenkins buried a smart two-sentence critique of Kent’s mouthing off midway through a Saturday sports-wrap column.

But nobody blasted Kent head-on. (In print, anyway: On sports-talk KNBR radio, he took some heat from hosts and callers.) A week later, the local media consensus seems to be that the controversy, in the end, was good for the Giants: Bonds’ defenders say it strengthened the team around Barry; Bonds’ detractors say it exposed a clubhouse cancer that needed to be detected as the first step toward treatment.

That’s just silly. There’s no way the late-August dustup helped the team: The Giants were on a best-of-season roll before the Reilly column, winning 20 of 26, and they’re 2-6 in the week or so since. Kent himself has been struggling at the plate, hitting under .200 over the last week. The team’s minislump may well be a fated, late-season dip (the Giants’ trademark) more than a reaction to Reilly, but a pennant-chasing team can’t help but be hurt by such distractions.

More important, the Reilly flap exposed a double standard in coverage of the Giants, Bonds and Kent that’s sloppy and lazy and maybe even partly racial. Worst of all, it showed the amazing extent to which reporters’ own experience of a sports star — the petty slights or the charm and flattery — can control the way they cover him, and how the star is in turn perceived by fans. Kent and Bonds are in many ways brothers under the skin: proud, hardworking, self-critical loners, family men with few friends on the team. Both have been known to stare through fans like they didn’t exist and stonewall kids’ requests for autographs.

In short, in some ways both guys are cocky assholes, but one is white and dutifully answers reporters’ questions, while the other is black and does not. Guess which one’s the media darling?

Reilly’s piece was marred by his petty and palpable dislike for Bonds — who once stood up an S.I. reporter, prompting S.I. to run a scathing portrait of the All-Star as a spoiled diva, and now Bonds refuses to talk to anyone from the magazine — as well as at errors and omissions. For instance, Bonds’ teammates did indeed pour out of the dugout to congratulate him when he hit his 500th home run in April, despite Reilly’s claim to the contrary. I was there.

The fact that Bonds greeted team batgirl Alexis Busch first — which Reilly used as a sign of his unpopularity with his teammates — was actually a sweet gesture that showed what’s best about him: his kindness to kids, on and off the field. (Reason 4,695 why Dusty Baker’s Giants are the best team in baseball: We have the only full-time batgirl.) Shortstop Rich Aurilia, who scored on the home run, embraced Bonds after Busch congratulated him, and other teammates hugged and high-fived him in the celebratory chaos that followed.

And if Reilly is going to ding Bonds for skipping the team photo, he might have done his homework: Kent missed the 2000 photo shoot, too. Maybe both had notes from their doctors, but Kent’s absence should have been noted if he was going to trash Bonds.

Reilly’s valorizing of tough Texas rancher Jeff Kent, in opposition to the pampered, earringed Californian Bonds, also pointed up an old ugly split that still mars baseball fandom and reporting: the elevation of gritty, hardworking, so-called blue-collar stars, usually white, over spoiled, overpaid, allegedly malingering superstars, who all too often just happen to be black. It’s Cal Ripken Jr., Will Clark, Brett Butler and Jeff Kent vs. Rickey Henderson, Albert Belle, Gary Sheffield and Barry Bonds — a few black fan and media favorites like Kirby Puckett and Tony Gwynn notwithstanding.

I’m a diehard Giants fan, and I actually love Kent. But any honest writer has to admit: On some of the same grounds where Bonds faces criticism, Kent too is kind of a jerk. Granted, he does great work on behalf of women’s sports and puts on baseball clinics for kids annually (Bonds does amazing work for inner-city kids and schools, and several health charities). But I’ve been to five years of spring training and almost 200 Giants games since Kent joined the team, and I’ve never once seen him sign an autograph, toss a ball to a fan or chat up a kid in the stands. (I’m not saying he never does any of that, but I’ve never seen him do it, and I have seen Bonds.)

Kent can play the diva, too. Batting behind Bonds, he’s made it known that he hates the speedy left-fielder stealing bases while he’s batting, because it distracts him, and subsequently Bonds has stolen much less frequently in recent years (admittedly being 37 has something to do with it, too).

And Kent is not exactly the life of the clubhouse. He’s taciturn and moody, hard on himself and sometimes on his teammates, and much like Bonds, has few close friends among the Giants. During an early-season slump he was quoted saying the Giants “suck,” which got him props with reporters but might not have been just what the doctor ordered for clubhouse morale.

But the media sure loved it, and that brings up the two crucial differences between Bonds and Kent: One is that while Kent may not chat up fans and kids or make nice with his teammates, he always talks to the media, at least during his five years in San Francisco, and reporters repay him with glowing coverage. The Chronicle’s Bruce Jenkins, in a column about the Reilly mess, acknowledged that one of Kent’s key strengths is “his willingness to address the media during the toughest times.” Ironically, it’s a skill Kent learned after a painful stint in New York, where his surliness with reporters earned him the reputation of — guess what? — clubhouse cancer.

The other key difference is that Kent is white and Bonds is black. I bring race into it reluctantly. But after I wrote a Salon piece about my late-blooming love of Bonds after his 500th home run, a black reader wrote to thank me for coming to Bonds’ defense, and posed the riddle: Imagine a black Jeff Kent.

And I’ve found myself thinking about that this week: Imagine a black Jeff Kent, who doesn’t sign autographs or socialize with his teammates, skips the team photo shoot, blasts the Giants to the media, complains when somebody tries to steal a base while he’s batting — and now, in the heat of a pennant race, runs his mouth to Sports Illustrated about his most accomplished and under-pressure teammate. What a diva! What a clubhouse cancer! What an asshole!

Now, even with all those strikes against him, a surly black Jeff Kent, if he chatted up reporters, would have a better reputation than Barry Bonds does. But a black Jeff Kent might not have the ease or entree with reporters Kent currently does, either. This isn’t to say that the writers critiquing Bonds and defending Kent are racist. But their comfort with the stars they cover plays a huge role in the way those stars are in turn perceived by fans. Nobody’s terribly comfortable with Bonds, and race has to be examined as one of many possible reasons for his bad rap.

The main reason, of course, is that Bonds isn’t very nice to reporters, and Kent, comparatively, is nicer. And that matters far more than it should. Baseball writers control perceptions of the stars they cover to a great extent, but they do it with a strange combination of absolute power and utter impotence. Their caste is a weird and fairly lowly one. Standing around the batting cage before a game will bring back your worst memories of high school alienation and awkwardness. The reporters are mostly nice but comparatively nerdy, not terribly athletic guys, who stand on the sidelines waiting for privileged superstars, guys who have everything — wealth, talent, women, amazing bodies, did we mention wealth and women? — to agree to answer their questions.

Sure, they have camaraderie among themselves, with the home-team staff and media folks and broadcasters, and some of them have it with some of the players. But on balance, occasionally going out to cover games, I’ve been struck by how all but the national media stars — Peter Gammons, George Will, probably Rick Reilly — often stand around the field like awkward boys at a middle school mixer, trying to get up the courage to ask someone to dance.

Bonds is mostly icy and oblivious; the well-liked Dusty Baker sometimes convenes his pre-game briefings begrudgingly, ridiculing dumb questions and barely tolerating good ones. Even Kent mostly ignores reporters before games. But Kent will step up after the game and answer both tough and easy questions, and for that he has many reporters’ fealty.

Rick Reilly is of course bigger than that. But his nasty Bonds story had legs because of other writers’ nasty Bonds stories — stories that are disproportionately based on the way Bonds treats the media, not his treatment of fans or teammates or the game of baseball, which he honors daily despite his failure to run out ground balls, or his big leather lounger and personal television in the Giants’ clubhouse.

Likewise, Kent’s trashing Bonds became a big story, and not an excuse to lambaste Kent for selfish, anti-team behavior because A) he actually said something that wasn’t a cliché to a sports reporter, which is news and B) reporters mostly respect and rely on Kent. So few of them said the obvious: His remarks to Reilly were a breach of the team ethic Kent claims to revere, and hurt the Giants far more than Bonds’ surliness with reporters.

There’s evidence Kent knows that; he’s been photographed smiling and conferring with Bonds and he’s mostly kept his mouth shut since the Reilly story appeared. But when I look at the reaction to Kent’s breach by the fraternity of sports writers, I think about my friends in the Los Angeles bar, and I can see why they still perceive undercurrents of racism in baseball, even if they’re wrong about Bonds’ obstacles as he tries to break McGwire’s record.

The piece is just factually wrong. First of all, the Project for Excellence in Journalism tracked Obama-Romney media coverage this year and found that the president received far more negative coverage than Romney did. GQ’s Devin Gordon took apart VandeHei and Allen here. He said everything I wanted to about the piece – most notably, the Times took the lead in reporting on Obama’s ties to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, starting with Jodi Kantor’s piece in April, 2007. Gordon found 2,950 references to Wright in the Times archives. Even if Gordon’s math is off by a factor of 10, that’s a lot of coverage.

Politico’s faux-outrage that both the Post and Times “ignored” David Maraniss’s story about Obama epic high school weed-smoking is silly, too: The future president inoculated himself against almost all drug revelations by revealing them himself in “Dreams from My Father.” The memoir leaves little doubt that Barry Obama was a lost stoner in high school. Who cares?

Meanwhile, Matt Drudge’s favorite journalists are angry that the Post published revelations about Romney’s high school bullying. They seem to think high school behavior matters in the case of Obama but not Romney, just another example of the pervasive partisan double standard in media. But I don’t want to say I learned nothing from the piece: It features populist Haley Barbour defending Ann Romney from the mean Times this way: “The New York Times does a huge exposé that Ann Romney rides horses. Well, so does my wife, and a few million other people. Watch out for equine performers!” You are so fricking losing the dressage vote, Team Obama! Take that!

The ultimate moral vacuum at the heart of the story is its failure to care that just two days after its “exposé” of Ann Romney’s fondness for seven-figure horses and the silly costumes that go with them, the Times ran a chilling investigative piece about Obama’s “kill list” process, with damning details about how the president decides on drone strikes and other methods of killing suspected terrorists.

The Times piece revealed that the administration has minimized its reported civilian casualties by counting all males killed, including minors, as “militants.” It contains the detail that echoes George Zimmerman’s thoughts about Trayvon Martin – that any young men in the vicinity of suspected terrorists must be “up to no good.” The single most haunting revelation, to me, was the fact that political guru David Axelrod sits in on the “Terror Tuesday” meetings, evidence that the president’s process is at least partly political. Oh, and “Terror Tuesday” isn’t my juvenile label for the meetings; according to the Times, that’s how they’re known in the White House. I hope they got that detail wrong. It even quotes Bush CIA director Michael Hayden praising the president but urging a little more transparency in his process. When a Bush-Cheney intelligence operative is telling you you’re keeping too many secrets, you maybe ought to think about it. (I’m going to write more about Obama, the Democrats, national security and “kill lists” next week.)

Politico’s only mention of the piece comes within Times editor Richard Stevenson’s email rebuttal to its charges. Clearly, VandeHei and Allen think a story about the president’s controversial drone policy is less grave and potentially damaging than a close look at Ann Romney’s dressage hobby. I can’t think of a better example of the mindset that drives trivial, democracy-degrading political coverage. Politico didn’t create that world, but it’s the news outlet that was most deliberately invented and perfected to make sure we continue to live in it.

Broadcast in New Hampshire, the swing state that also leads the nation in per capita student debt, the ad highlighted “the fact that the president has not been able to help students deal with this crushing debt,” according to Romney spokesman Ryan Williams. Unfortunately, the ad used footage of New Hampshire students complaining about their loan burden without their permission, and one of them happens to plan to vote for Obama. “Considering I am not a supporter of Mitt Romney, this is not exactly sitting well with me,” said Southern New Hampshire University sophomore Matt Raso. The campaign pulled the footage when a local television station objected, but Ryan Williams told the Associated Press that the campaign plans to run ads blaming the student loan crisis on Obama in other swing states.

That takes a kind of chutzpah Romney rarely exhibits. He won’t stand up to birther bully Donald Trump or the misogynist Rush Limbaugh, but he apparently has the cojones to blame student debt on Obama. We’ll see how it goes. In fact, American student debt is a scandal in which state and national lawmakers in both parties share some blame. But by far the lion’s share of responsibility for the debacle belongs to Republicans. The roots of the crisis go back to California Gov. Ronald Reagan, who imposed the first “fees” on the formerly free University of California system in 1968, declaring “the state should not subsidize intellectual curiosity.” As president, Reagan helped nationalize that disdain for well-funded public higher education in the 1980s.

But it took a long roster of Republican governors to turn the problem into a crisis, and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney led the way a decade ago, dramatically slashing public higher-education funding and hiking fees during his one term. According to the Boston Globe, from 2003 to 2007, fees and tuition jumped 63 percent at Massachusetts’s once-stellar system of public higher education as Romney slashed state funding year after year, for a total of $140 million, or 14 percent, in four years. Not surprisingly, average student debt in Massachusetts jumped 25 percent while Romney was governor. Between 2001 and 2011, tuition and fees have more than doubled at the state’s community college, state university and UMass campuses, but the bulk of the added burden piled up under Romney.

Romney also wanted to spin off the flagship UMass-Amherst and privatize three other colleges, including the medical school, a harbinger of what he says he’ll do as president. That agenda failed in Massachusetts, but it would be a shame to give him a second chance as president.

It’s tragic that Republicans have become the dismantlers of public universities, since it was Abraham Lincoln who signed the Morrill Act in 1862, creating the system of land-grant colleges that made the U.S. a country of unusually broad opportunity. (Of course, today’s GOP has betrayed Lincoln in many other ways.) “Abraham Lincoln is weeping today,” university president Graham Spanier told reporters when Pennsylvania’s Republican Gov. Tom Corbett slashed Penn State funding by $182 million last year. It was the aggressive expansion of college education access after World War II that helped create the vast American middle class. In 1946, only one in eight college-aged student got higher education; by 1970, one in three did. And the balance of enrollment shifted to public institutions: In the 1940s, most students attended private colleges; by 1970 three-quarters were enrolled in public ones.

Presidents from Truman through Eisenhower and Nixon to Carter continued to endorse and enable broad college access, but the tide began to turn in the 1960s as universities became hotbeds of political protest and the new educated generation began to use its college smarts to question society rather than become cogs in the corporate machine. But we can make too much of Reagan’s resentment of Berkeley radicals as a factor in his push to end free UC tuition. He and his backers were anxious to dismantle the public sector and the tax structure that made it possible as well as to privatize all sorts of formerly public institutions, creating lucrative new money-making opportunities for their wealthy friends.

The result: University tuition is up 128 percent nationwide since 1980, the year Reagan became president (and coincidentally, the year I graduated from the University of Wisconsin, when I paid less than $400 a semester). Public university tuition has tripled since then. In that same period, the middle class has shrunk, the poor have gotten poorer and the rich have gotten richer. Is it all connected to our breaking our promises to our kids about higher education? Not entirely, but it’s not a random coincidence, either.

The Romney-Reagan approach to higher education has a lot in common with their overall approach to the economy. Let’s take jobs as an example. Under Reagan, median wages for the working and middle classes began to stagnate and fall – but household debt began to rise. It was as if the GOP-unleashed private sector figured out how to make money lending families the money that they were no longer making in income. Republicans have the same approach to higher education: They slashed public funding and then let their banker friends “help” students afford higher tuition by lending them the cash to pay for it. Now, of course, the nation’s student loan debt is larger than its credit card debt, and graduates leave college carrying about $25,000 in loans. It’s like a mortgage, but without the house.

Andrew Leonard wrote a great piece Tuesday about Romney’s ties to the for-profit education industry and his commitment to relax Obama administration regulations on that high-profit, low-student-success sector. That’s the other key to Romney’s higher education agenda: slash public funding, increase the student loan burden and privatize the whole system as much as possible. Leonard explains what’s wrong with Romney’s priorities more succinctly than I could:

The biggest for-profit schools generate 80 to 90 percent of their revenue from federally guaranteed student loans. Only one out of every ten American college students attends a for-profit institution, but these students account for a quarter of all student debt and almost half of all student loan dollars in default. There’s no sugar-coating it: The booming for-profit industry is one of the worst possible examples of the “free market” in action that one can find in the entire U.S. educational sector. For-profits charge higher tuition rates than their public school competitors, graduation rates are lower, and the entire business would not exist without massive government subsidization in the form of cheap student loans.

Romney is also pledging to undo one of Obama’s most progressive reforms: his overhaul of the student loan system, taking banks (and their gouging) out of the middle of the government-guaranteed loan relationship.

It’s against that backdrop that Romney is trying to blame Obama for the student loan crisis. It won’t work. Democrats need to pay much more attention to Romney’s higher education record in Massachusetts. It’s no wonder he doesn’t like to talk about those years.

Obviously Blitzer could have cut “beginning to look a little” from his put-down, but those were harsh words coming from Blitzer. Trump had already insulted the CNN anchor’s ratings, telling him, “Frankly, if you would report [the birther conspiracy] accurately, I think you would probably get better ratings than you’re getting, which are pretty small.”

So Obama surrogates Hilary Rosen and Cory Booker were almost universally denounced for ill-chosen words on behalf of the president, but Trump gets to insult not just Obama but an influential cable news anchor on behalf of Romney with no reprisals? That’s the old IOKIYAR double standard at work, but this time, it might actually backfire and hurt Romney.

For his part, Romney refused to either cut ties with Trump or denounce him. And his refusal to do so was a craven exercise in electoral groveling. “You know,” he told reporters Monday night, “I don’t agree with all the people who support me, and my guess is they don’t all agree with everything I believe in. But I need to get 50.1 percent or more, and I’m appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people.” What else will Romney do to get to 50.1 percent? Stay tuned.

Of course, that’s not the first time Romney has refused to denounce or distance himself from a Republican supporter. When Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute,” he merely said it was “not the language I would have used.” When Ted Nugent said “if Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will be either be dead or in jail by this time next year,” Romney simply asked for more civility in politics. When a supporter said Obama should be “tried for treason,” Romney didn’t challenge her at all and later told reporters: “I don’t correct all of the questions that get asked of me. Obviously I don’t agree that he should be tried.” Romney keeps getting served big fat pitches to let him take a swing at a defining moment of political courage, pitches that he could knock out of the park. He just watches them float by.

Maybe Romney thinks he needs the birther loons to get elected. The base isn’t crazy about him. And Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald reveals that Orly Taitz and Joseph Farah are thrilled that Trump continues to advance their cause. But this can’t end well. For better or worse, independents are likely to decide this election, and birther nonsense isn’t going to win them over.

I’ve probably reached my own personal low when I’m fact checking Trump’s lies, but today he consistently claimed – referencing a Breitbart.com story – that Obama’s “publisher” wrote that he was born in Kenya; in fact, the dubious story makes clear it was his literary agent, in a publicity brochure about her clients. (A former agency assistant quickly took the blame for the mistake and said the information didn’t come from Obama.)

Also, when talking about the agent’s brochure to the Daily Beast, Trump said it was a mistake made by a young man who “didn’t know he was running for president, so he told the truth.”  But when dismissing Blitzer’s reference to the Honolulu Star Bulletin’s Barack Obama birth announcement just days after he was born, Trump argues “many people put those announcements in because they wanted to get the benefit of being so-called born in this country.” So his parents knew enough to fake a birth announcement, but the young Harvard Law Review president threw all their hard work away to sell a book? Uh oh, I’m trying to find consistency in a Donald Trump argument. Time to close. Romney owns everything Trump says, and it will cost him in November.

The Breitbart.com empire must be proud Trump is using their story as “proof” of his birther nonsense. Even as they printed the allegation, they stressed that Breitbart himself didn’t support birtherism, and they insisted that they only published the story about the agent’s brochure just to prove the media didn’t vet Obama. Let’s get this straight: So they’re chiding the media for not publishing something that they themselves believe to be false. That’s awesome journalism.

In related news: Regarding the revival of Trump birtherism, I said Friday on “Hardball” that Breitbart’s journalistic proteges were “bottom feeders,” and one of them quickly proved it.  I appreciate all the support I got on Twitter, but to me it was a dog bites man story, and utterly predictable. (I apologize to dogs everywhere for that unfair comparison.)

I talked about how Trump hurts Romney on MSNBC’s “Politics Nation” Tuesday afternoon:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Today it’s appalling: puffed up by Romney’s flattery, the preening, orange-haired narcissist doubled down on his idiotic birther claims against the president, telling the Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove: “Look, it’s very simple. A book publisher came out three days ago and said that in his written synopsis of his book, he said he was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia. His mother never spent a day in the hospital.”

If you haven’t been following the story, and I tried not to, the addled spawn of Andrew Breitbart found a dusty 20-year-old catalog from Obama’s former literary agency that said he was born in Kenya. An assistant quickly said that she wrote down incorrect information. Trump doesn’t believe her.

“That’s what he told the literary agent,” Trump told Grove. “That’s the way life works … He didn’t know he was running for president, so he told the truth. The literary agent wrote down what he said … He said he was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia … Now they’re saying it was a mistake. Just like his Kenyan grandmother said he was born in Kenya, and she pointed down the road to the hospital, and after people started screaming at her she said, ‘Oh, I mean Hawaii.’ Give me a break.”

Give us a break, Mitt. It was already embarrassing that you were using Trump as a fundraising lure – why not raffle off a dinner with Dick Cheney, who’s hosting a fundraiser for you in July? At least Darth Vader has gravitas; Trump is a joke. Pretending to run for president, Trump made birtherism his big issue, and ultimately Obama responded by prevailing on the state of Hawaii to release his long-form birth certificate – a truly sad moment for this country, when the overwhelmingly elected president, a black man, has to show a nasty rich white guy his papers.

If you ever want an example of the vicious political double standard that helps Republicans in this country, here it is: Democrat Hilary Rosen said something inartful about Ann Romney being a stay-at-home mom, and the entire Democratic Party had to denounce her; Obama campaign leaders tripped over themselves to be the first to push her under the bus; Rosen immediately apologized. But Romney has been able to keep his ties to Trump as well as misogynist Rush Limbaugh without political penalty — so far.

This is a moment for the presumptive Republican nominee to stand up for sanity and distance himself from the crackpot birther fringe, and tell Trump he’s going to have to cancel their dinner date. Maybe he’s got to wash his hair that night. Or one of Ann Romney’s cars.

Does Romney have the integrity and courage to do that? I don’t think so, but I’d love to be surprised.

Throughout the president’s first term, his most ardent supporters have reacted to those of us pushing him to do – and say – more on such issues with frustration and anger, some of it nasty and personal, some of it thoughtful and well-argued. They rightly blame Congress for blocking action on key progressive priorities, but strangely downplay the power of presidential leadership. Late last year, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait twice attacked liberal Obama critics for being “unreasonable” about what the president alone could accomplish, because “liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president.”

Chait took particular aim at lefty image guru Drew Westen, a one-time Obama admirer who criticized the president in the New York Times not merely for what he hadn’t accomplished, but for failing to tell a compelling story. Chait accused Westen and other progressives of embracing:

…a model of American politics in which the president in not only the most important figure, but his most powerful weapon is rhetoric. The argument appears calculated to infuriate anybody with a passing familiarity with the basics of political science. In Westen’s telling, every known impediment to legislative progress — 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. The impediment to an era of total an uncompromising liberal success is Obama’s failure to properly deploy this awesome weapon.

Chait caricatured Westen’s argument (and the beliefs of those who agreed with it), but he got lots of love for both pieces in the pro-Obama blogosphere, where folks finally felt they had a real diagnosis for the illness of those they dismissed as “emoprogs.” But now that we see the changes wrought by Obama’s politically risky embrace of gay marriage, maybe it will be easier for folks to understand that it’s the job of political advocates not merely to praise, but to push their leaders forward.

Steve Kornacki runs down the astonishing political changes we’ve seen in the mere two weeks since the president carefully announced his supposed change of heart on gay marriage. The nation’s largest African-American organization, the NAACP, has come out behind it – and maybe most important, recognized it as an important civil rights issue. Maybe most dramatic, in Maryland, African-American voters have now flipped to support the state’s gay marriage ballot measure 55 to 36 percent –almost the exact percentage by which they opposed it in previous polling on the state issue. And in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, African-Americans’ support for gay marriage jumped to 59 percent from 41 percent in the wake of the president’s historic announcement.

Now, I’m not going to argue that Obama’s turnaround alone caused this sea change. The arc of the moral universe has been bending toward justice on gay rights for a long time, and as I wrote last week, the president gave it an additional tug. There have been advocates within the NAACP working to make this happen for a long time, and they deserve a lot of credit. African-American voter opinion had already been trending in this direction, even if black voters had been less receptive to gay marriage than other demographic groups. There is also an emotional and personal component to the president’s stance that makes his moral suasion hard to replicate on behalf of, say, the jobs bill or the public option. (And let’s also remember it’s white voters who are most hostile on some of those economic issues, thanks to the divide and conquer politics of the GOP over the last 40 years.)

Still, it’s hard not to conclude that Obama’s words made a significant difference in the political course of this debate. Ironically, it was once critics of Obama who mocked the power of words, and specifically the candidate’s own oratorical gifts. Obama shot back at them many times.

“Don’t tell me words don’t matter,” he told Wisconsin Democrats in February 2008. “‘I have a dream’ — just words. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ — just words. ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’ – just words. Just speeches.” At many times over the last three years, I’ve been amazed at how Obama’s critics and supporters seemed to change sides on the question of the power of his words.

I give the folks who call themselves “prag progs” – pragmatic progressives, as opposed to “unreasonable” emoprogs – a lot of credit for fixing attention on what the president has accomplished, and reminding others not merely to fixate on what he hasn’t. But I think it’s time that all of us acknowledge that there’s a role for constructive pressure, too. Progressive change has always required impatient agitators – and it will continue to.