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Ian Leslie’s Marbury blog is the one American politics blog I read no matter what. Maybe it’s because he’s British: somehow, he always seems to give me just what I want to know.

Ian’s got a post up at the moment about President Obama’s role as the nation’s confidence booster. As always, he gets it just about right.

Like me, Ian doesn’t want Obama to listen to former Clinton advisers like Mark Penn. Penn’s latest Politico column urges Obama to start talking the talk:

Stop talking the economy and America down with words like “catastrophe,” and talk up how we can come out of this sooner if we all pull together. The president now has to return to the can-do rhetoric of the campaign — that is, the rhetoric of Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Clinton — rhetoric that inspires confidence.

I think both Ian and I would prefer some honesty about the situation, instead of Penn’s failed brand of spin. We know we’re in the shit – so don’t start trying to tell us that things are fine.

So, in the dream world in which I advise Obama, I would say: be straight. If the polls are to be believed, it might end up being the best move anyway.