To those liberals still hoping for a left turn in economic policy during Obama’s second term (bless their souls), reading last weekend’s New York Times interview with the President must have seemed like a vindication of the faith.

Just name-dropping “Bob” Putnam’s Bowling Alone, that urtext of Clintonian Third Way liberalism, probably would have been enough to send the hearts of highly educated liberals aflutter. But there was more. Obama gestured toward the findings of a major recent study documenting the decline of social mobility in the United States. He looked back nostalgically to the postwar Golden Age, that sacred time when even the lowliest working stiff had a fair shake at achieving the American Dream. And he invoked the memory of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom by talking up his framed original copy of the day’s program.

By harkening back to an era when Rustin and Reuther, King and Keyserling, Harrington and Humphrey could still march arm-in-arm toward an American version of social democracy, Obama sought to spark hopes that such a dream (or some rough facsimile of it) remains within reach in our own time.