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.

Coulter admits she relies on Pethokoukis, so let’s go directly to the source. To recap, Nutting crunched Office of Management and Budget and Congressional Budget Office numbers to find that under Obama, spending has risen at an annualized rate of 1.4 percent, less than any president since Dwight Eisenhower. It jumped 8.1 percent in the last three years of the George W. Bush presidency, and in fiscal year 2009, for which Bush approved the budget, it jumped 17.9 percent. But Bush isn’t the most profligate Republican: Ronald Reagan increased spending an average of 8.7 percent in his first term.

Pethokoukis quarrels with Nutting’s assigning Bush’s budget to Bush, because “Obama chose not to reverse that elevated level of spending; thus he, along with congressional Democrats, are responsible for it.” Exactly how one president undoes the spending approved by another president under a different Congress goes unexplained. The AEI pundit also argues that we should look at federal spending as a percent of GDP, and he notes that’s gone up under Obama, attempting to prove that Nutting is mistaken – but that’s a useless metric during a recession, which by definition shrinks GDP.

Coulter goes even further (of course). “It turns out Rex Nutting, author of the phony Marketwatch chart, attributes all spending during Obama’s entire first year, up to Oct. 1, to President Bush.” (The italics are in the original; they’re where the good writing is supposed to be.) She continues: “That means, for example, the $825 billion stimulus bill, proposed, lobbied for, signed and spent by Obama, goes in … Bush’s column.”

Shockingly, Coulter is … wrong. First of all, only about $120 billion of the stimulus was spent in fiscal year 2009 – and Nutting counted it in Obama’s column. He also included new funds appropriated under Obama and the Democratic congressional majority for the child health insurance program and other projects. And it says so quite clearly on the nifty chart Coulter finds fault with: $140 billion spent in the 2009 budget year is plainly attributed to Obama. It also says so in the text of the story, for people who don’t read charts.

“I attributed all the new spending I could find to Obama,” Nutting told me in an email. “I looked at the CBO’s budget outlook from Jan. 2009, and spending for ’09 was actually lower than CBO projected. And spending has been flat since then.”

Coulter also claims that Nutting’s piece has been ignored by the New York Times, but in fact David Firestone weighed in today, and made a point I should have made: It’s actually sad that a Democratic president is kvelling about cutting the rate of federal spending growth to its lowest level since Dwight Eisenhower (actually, I made that point last August). Firestone notes that various budget deals aim to cut discretionary spending by $800 billion over a decade, by trimming education, food, housing, transportation and job training programs. “This category of spending, which used to be 5 percent of the gross domestic product in Nixon’s days, is heading down to less than 2 percent,” Firestone notes. Pethokoukis and Coulter ought to be applauding.

I’ve hailed Nutting’s piece not because I’m happy that Obama has presided over such stingy budgets (largely forced to by congressional Republicans), but because I’m glad to see a reporter telling the truth. If Pethokoukis and Coulter are the best the GOP can do to tear his work down, maybe more reporters will join him.

But if you measure the power of a lie by its utter truthlessness combined with the breadth of its reach, the notion that Obama has presided over a wild federal spending spree is probably the biggest whopper spread by the GOP, with the help of the right-wing noise machine and lazy mainstream media. Mitt Romney regularly rails against the “debt and spending inferno” the president supposedly ignited. Last month on Fox, Charles Krauthammer called Obama’s spending “radical, unprecedented,” and CBS Radio’s Mark Knoller reported that the “National debt has increased more under Obama than under Bush.”

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal’s Marketwatch debunked all of those claims: “Although there was a big stimulus bill under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s,” writes Rex Nutting. “Even hapless Herbert Hoover managed to increase spending more than Obama has.” In his first term, Obama will have increased spending by 1.4 percent; in his last three years, George W. Bush increased annual spending by an average of 8.1 percent – and in Bush’s last fiscal year, 2009, spending jumped 17.9 percent. Republican deity Ronald Reagan increased spending an average of 8.7 percent in his first term. Nutting continues:

After adjusting for inflation, spending under Obama is falling at a 1.4 percent annual pace — the first decline in real spending since the early 1970s, when Richard Nixon was retreating from the quagmire in Vietnam.

In per capita terms, real spending will drop by nearly 5 percent from $11,450 per person in 2009 to $10,900 in 2013 (measured in 2009 dollars).

Strangely, Marketwatch frames Nutting’s article as “commentary,” I guess because he’s an opinion columnist, but his facts and figures come straight from the non-partisan Office of Management and Budget and Congressional Budget Office. The charts he uses are vivid and leave no room for doubt: When the president says he’s dropped spending to its lowest levels since the Eisenhower presidency – back before the Civil Rights Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Clean Water Act, the Economic Opportunity Act, or the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency or Department of Education — he’s telling the truth.

Mild-mannered White House press secretary Jay Carney was nearly moved to swearing on Wednesday, pointing to the facts outlined by Nutting and telling reporters “don’t buy into GOP B.S.” (That became a leading Politico headline later in the day.) But will the media heed Carney’s warning?

We’ll see. Somehow I doubt it. I discussed where the “big spender” lie fits into the pantheon of GOP falsehoods on MSNBC’s “Hardball” with David Corn:

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

Democrats are wringing their hands over the latest circular firing squad, but I think all the self-promotion and betrayal is a good thing. It should remind Democrats why many working- and middle-class people either sit out elections or don’t think there’s a big difference between the parties. For the last 20 years, folks like Rattner, Booker and Ford have tried to make sure their party courted Wall Street more slavishly than the GOP – and they often succeeded. We ought to remember that history before we get carried away with our populist high-fiving in the 2012 campaign, convinced that Obama deserves to win the fealty of the unemployed, underemployed and Occupy Wall Street, too.

I’ve always kind of liked Cory Booker, even while knowing he was a privileged Ivy Leaguer in love with his own capacity to reconcile conflict and also to convince rich people and Republicans that Democrats don’t hate them – kind of like Barack Obama, before he got sandbagged by the modern GOP. I still don’t think Booker has gotten nearly enough grief for his multilayered betrayal of Obama on “Meet the Press.” For one thing, he stepped on the president’s message, which is a terrible move for a trusted surrogate. He also played the despicable false-equivalence game – and he did it again in the video he made to try to walk back some of the damage he’d done. Booker keeps claiming what he really finds “nauseating” are the negative super PAC ads “from both sides” – but the Bain attack is coming directly from the Obama campaign (although the pro-Obama Priorities USA contributed one ad to the mix). Besides, it’s outrageous to equate the Bain attacks with the Fred Davis-Joe Ricketts plan to morph the president into Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I expect Republicans to try to make that lame argument, not Democrats.

Maybe most unfair, Booker and Ford endorsed the GOP lie that Obama has it in for private equity generally, not merely the excesses of firms like Bain. They’re only egging on the Wall Street wusses who act like the president has nationalized the banks just because he signed on to the flawed Dodd-Frank bill and once called a few of them “fat cats.” Booker and Ford are clearly only out for themselves, anxious to prove there are some Democrats who still love Wall Street. Of course, this shouldn’t surprise us: Booker has teamed up with hedge fund moguls and other super-rich private equity folks (as well as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates) in the course of reforming Newark’s schools as well as generally advancing his career. (He’s also ignored public records laws to keep those big donors from scrutiny.)

I wrote about Rattner’s comments earlier. By all accounts he did a decent job as auto czar, helping the president restructure the big three automakers and save the industry. But the big Democratic Party donor is clearly trying to pull the party back from those who are coming to understand that its fealty to Wall Street has hurt it with working- and middle-class voters – and much more important, has hurt the country. It’s Democrats who have for years protected the carried interest rule, keeping tax rates low for investors and private equity principals like Mitt Romney. Booker, Ford and Rattner are firing a warning shot at Democrats who are wandering away from their Wall Street. To its credit, the Obama team is doubling down on its Bain campaign, and let’s hope that continues.

Here’s the Romney ad:

Davis, Ayers and friends should remember that Obama sent in special ops to take out Somali pirates in 2010. These pirates’ fate might be similar. Politically, of course. I’m not suggesting anyone use violence against them. And they’re not suggesting anyone use violence against Obama, of course — although their pitch is chock-full of eliminationist rhetoric. From its title, which promises to “stop [Obama's] spending for good,” to its description of being “locked, loaded and ready” to “hit Barack right between the eyes” and bring about “his demise,” the memo the New York Times released today is right-wing hate porn, designed for maximum titillation to Ricketts, its intended audience. It may not have worked on Ricketts, whose PAC disavowed the plan Thursday afternoon after a day of negative publicity. But will it work on anyone else?

I doubt it. The 54-page PowerPoint is certainly a quick, fun read, a guide to the profiteering right-wing id. I loved the idea that they wanted to unveil the whole campaign in Charlotte during the Democratic convention: I can’t think of anything that would get the oft-divided Democratic Party fired up better than right-wingers with flyover Rev. Wright hate porn. Although the plan is supposedly designed to demonstrate Obama’s “incompetence,” it’s hard to see what Wright’s views have to do with Obama’s competence – unless you’re of the opinion that nothing says “incompetence” like a black man having something to do with another black man. The writers reassure Ricketts they’ve minimized the risk of being charged with racism by lining up a “highly literate” (that must have been hard) black spokesman, Larry Elder, whom they’re paying $25,000 to serve as frontman. (If I were Larry, I’d talk to an employment discrimination lawyer: I think a white guy would get more than $25,000 to front a $10 million ad campaign. Not to mention to sell his soul.)

Can the Wright fear-mongering work? I think it mainly plays with people who wouldn’t vote for the president, anyway. I’m one of the few liberals who wrote with concern about the Wright revelations back in 2008. I didn’t want to believe that Obama looked the other way as Wright preached the unredeemable evil of the United States (and most white people), along with self-defeating theories of black difference and downright lies about genocide. But I never believed Obama shared those opinions. I assumed he admired Trinity’s social work and political connections. I didn’t think he spent a whole lot of time in its pews or listening to Wright’s views. Still, I thought it was fair to look at what Obama’s ties to Wright told us about his politics – and like most people, I quickly decided: not much.

Four years later, independents are able to see that Obama has in fact been a fairly hawkish president, whose foreign policy certainly didn’t come from the Jeremiah Wright hymnal. In fact, his expansion of drone warfare, with its inevitable civilian casualties, is precisely the kind of thing Wright and other foreign policy critics think can result in “chickens coming home to roost.” And it’s not like the media ignored Wright, either. Remember that whole race speech candidate Obama had to make in March 2008 – against the advice of strategists who worried it would backfire?

The notion that the Wright mess didn’t get adequate attention comes down to one fact: that John McCain wouldn’t greenlight a lurid strategy to blacken Obama (literally and figuratively) with scary ads about Wright. For that, McCain earns derision from his former campaign advisors: They call him “a crusty old politician who often seemed confused, burdened with a campaign just as confused.”

What is Mitt Romney saying about the so-called Ricketts plan? He told reporters this morning he hadn’t had time to read the papers (typical Romney bravery), although he’d already done his own Wright-baiting in a February interview with Sean Hannity. By this afternoon, the Romney campaign released a statement disavowing the proposal (and Romney himself then told the conservative Townhall site that he would “repudiate” the Super PAC’s ad strategy). Even Ricketts did the same, in a statement from his PAC saying “he is neither the author nor the funder of the so-called Ricketts Plan to defeat Mr. Obama that The New York Times wrote about this morning…. [I]t reflects an approach to politics that Mr. Ricketts rejects and it was never a plan to be accepted but only a suggestion for a direction to take.” (Jeff Zeleny of the Times later Tweeted that a reference on page 46 of the plan suggests that it had received tentative approval at a meeting in New York.)

You can decide whether or not you believe that. I think it’s good news that even Joe Ricketts can be shamed out of such a crude and racialized appeal. That doesn’t mean we won’t see such appeals in the months to come, just that they probably won’t come with a prominent billionaire’s name on them.