If President Obama’s intention in channelling Teddy Roosevelt yesterday was to rally the center-left troops, he largely succeeded.

The Times editorial page said the speech

felt an awfully long time in coming, but it was the most potent blow the president has struck against the economic theory at the core of every Republican presidential candidacy and dear to the party’s leaders in Congress. The notion that the market will take care of all problems if taxes are kept low and regulations are minimized…

On the Huffpo, Bob Reich, the former labor secretary, who has been vocal in his criticisms of Obama, hailed “the most important speech of his presidency,” adding,

Here, finally, is the Barack Obama many of us thought we had elected in 2008. Since then we’ve had a president who has only reluctantly stood up to the moneyed interests Teddy Roosevelt and his cousin Franklin stood up to.

Judging by the response to my post yesterday, in the comments section and on Twitter, many Obama supporters agreed that it represented a big improvement. One friend of mine e-mailed last night to say she had gone to Obama’s campaign Web site and made a donation, adding, “We need to reinforce this trend.”

Of course, words are just words—“This speech, like 99% of presidential speeches, will be shortly forgotten and historically irrelevant,” tweeted Matt Yglesias, who recently moved his informative blog to Slate. Yglesias also tweeted a link to Obama’s jobs speech to Congress from a few months back, adding, “Obama did this pivot in September; it changed nothing and now everyone’s forgotten.”

Count me as a skeptic. On this occasion, though, I think Yglesias and other critics went too far. For sure, most Presidential speeches don’t mean much. But some do, and this was one of them—for various reasons.

First: it had some real heft. When was the last time you heard a President citing studies showing declining social mobility between the poor and the middle class? Or talking about the growing gap between productivity and wages? As Reich pointed out, “It’s the first time (Obama) or any other president has clearly stated the long-term structural problem that’s been widening the gap between the very top and everyone else for thirty years.”

At last, the President did what I and others have been calling on him to do for yonks. He presented a coherent narrative of what has been happening to America, and it was a very disturbing narrative:

For most Americans, the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded. Long before the recession hit, hard work stopped paying off for too many people. Fewer and fewer of the folks who contributed to the success of our economy actually benefitted from that success. Those at the top grew wealthier from their incomes and investments than ever before. A financial sector where irresponsibility and lack of basic oversight nearly destroyed our economy. The typical CEO who used to earn about 30 times more than his or her workers now earns 110 times more. And yet over the last decade, the incomes of most Americans have actually fallen by about six percent. Inequality also distorts our democracy. It gives an outsized voice to the few who can afford high-priced lobbyists and unlimited campaign contributions, and runs the risk of selling our democracy to the highest bidder.

If you go and read Obama’s speech to Congress on September 8th, you will find little of this. He was then calling on Congress to pass his jobs bill, which combined tax cuts with targeted infrastructure investments. The pivot was away from debt ceilings and deficit reduction toward more stimulus spending, although, of course, Obama didn’t use that word.

Another reason the Kansas speech was important is that it signaled that Obama intends to fight next year’s election on a traditional Democratic platform: defending the middle class. Back in 2008, John Edwards and (to a lesser extent) Hillary Clinton were the class warriors. Obama, although he did end up proposing a middle-class tax cut of his own to blunt Clinton’s appeal, ran on a platform in which economics was subservient to his broader vision of hope and change. This time around, Obama seems to be taking as his model Bill Clinton, one of whose slogans in 1992 was ‘The Forgotten Middle Class”; or perhaps even Teddy Roosevelt’s ill-fated “Bull-Moose” campaign of 1912, where he ran on a Progressive Party platform that declared, “To destroy this invisible Government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.”