Our American CatharsisWill Obama-time be a transitory experience or an enduring tragedy? For years conservatives have railed about the creeping welfare state. They have tried to tag liberals with being soft on national security, both for courting those who faulted America and for faulting others who courted it. The parameters of all these fights were well known, as talk radio, the blogs, and cable news hourly took up hammer and tongs against the creeping “liberal agenda.†But for all the furor, there were few unabashed leftist gladiators in the arena who openly fought under the banner of radically transforming the...