The article in its entirety shouldn't be missed, but these last few paragraphs are extra.
What the dissenting, or “resisting,” side needs is exactly what Obama can help supply: principled leadership from as close to a universally respected figure as one could hope to find. At a moment when the leadership of the congressional Democrats is desperately uninspired, and the next generation of liberal voices has yet to emerge or remains uncertain of purpose, the opposition is in need of real leadership, meaning what real leadership always is: a voice of reason lit by passion.
No one wants, or expects, deliverance. The purpose of leadership is neither to be “messianic” or to encourage blind obedience. Good leaders don’t make followers; they make participants. Much needs to be done, but even more needs to be said. The window of meaning needs to be widened. One imagines Obama, with his usual rhetorical deftness, making the point that the neo-secessionists and the neo-Nazis are not merely extraneous, obnoxious fringe groups—they represent exactly the enemies whom Americans united to defeat in their two most consequential wars. We are not merely combatting the enemy within; we are reaffirming what unifies us in history by carrying the fight forward.
One can hear in one’s head—and even directly in one’s ear from impatient others—the objection that Obama’s is already a voice of the past. But history does not work with such relentless linear direction. Figures long dismissed arise to lead when necessary—Churchill being the most obvious example—and lights gone dark often reappear to illuminate a new time. Obviously, we need new generations of leaders and the ascent of newer voices. Yet coalitions of the kind that this emergency demands need voices capable of speaking to the many, not the few, articulating values held in common, not in contest. It could be that Barack Obama’s true historical moment will arrive, with an irony of a kind that American history specializes in, not during his Presidency but after it.
(emphasis mine)