You know, while I think it’s great that Howard’s saying this, the fact is, it don’t mean squat if he’s not backing it up with a primary challenge. He knows it, Obama knows it and we all know it, too:

NEW YORK – Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean has a message for President Barack Obama: Reclaim progressive voters or risk both re-election and the future of the Democratic Party for years to come.

Dean, the former Democratic National Committee chairman and one-time presidential contender, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that Obama has “clearly upset members of his base” on issues including tax cuts and allowing gays to serve openly in the military. Obama stands to lose both the presidency and his party’s credibility if he doesn’t reverse course before 2012, Dean said.

“You take care of the people who sent you to the office,” he said in an interview. “There are hundreds of thousands of people under 30 who slept on floors for two years to make sure Barack got elected. You can’t turn your back on those people because if you do, it’s going to be hard to find any friends.”

Dean, whose 2004 presidential bid was largely fueled online by young, activist voters, is a prominent spokesman for the party’s progressive wing. While he has frequently criticized the president, Dean announced through a spokeswoman earlier this month that he would not mount a primary challenge against Obama in 2012.

Howard, if you want him to listen, put up or shut up.

I think Ezra’s missing the obvious here. Despite results that indicate otherwise, it’s pretty clear that Obama just thinks he… knows better, he’s got a bit of a martyr complex and he thinks all that messy partisan fighting is just too icky for words:

The outcome of yesterday’s long-awaited powwow between President Obama and the Republican congressional leadership was a plan for further powwows — these helmed by OMB director Jack Lew and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and including one negotiator from both parties from both chambers — meant to get past the impasse over the Bush tax cuts. Which is to say, the White House just took ownership of this process. A bad deal is now their bad deal. A failure to reach a deal is now their failure to reach a deal. And one of those outcomes is probably more likely than a great deal that somehow makes everyone happy.

The White House could’ve left this to Congress and simply run against — and vetoed — any outcomes they didn’t like. That they’re inserting themselves this directly is surprising considering that many in the building believe the legislator-in-chief role Obama assumed over the last two years yoked them to congressional dealmaking and sunk their popularity. It suggests, actually, that this approach is encoded deeper in the administration’s DNA than some previously thought.