What will it take for the left to rally behind Obama again? His Ramadan speech should be a start.

Over the last week, there has been a lot of consternation in the progressive community over White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’s interview with The Hill in which he aired a series of grievances with the left. Gibbs offered several caustic comments, perhaps inartfully stated, that captured the White Houses’s frustration with the fact that the president, long-attacked as a socialist by the right, is now also being assailed as a capitulator by the left.

Indeed, some liberals have argued that, on issue after issue, the president has “caved.” These liberals believe that Obama should have fought for a public option, and that he walked away from a winnable fight to get it. Rather than waging war for progressive values, he’s given in.

I completely disagree, and I understand the White House’s concern with the left’s turn against it. On a practical level, liberal angst could do real damage to Democrats this election season by sapping energy from voter turnout efforts. Many progressives, however, don’t seem to realize that this would also harm their cause. After all, won’t a Republican Congress be much, much worse than a Democratic one? (Further food for thought: If the president was the capitulator some on the left accuse him of being, would his actions have spawned the Tea Party that attacks him daily?)

Amid this intensifying friction, Obama staked out a bold, progressive, even unpopular position Friday night when he spoke out in favor of the Islamic center near Ground Zero. “The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country and that they will not be treated differently by their government is essential to who we are. The writ of the founders must endure,” the president said.

The question now is … whither liberals?