At last, the fiery candidate Barack Obama has returned to inspire the troops in support of the stimulus bill.

Obama’s speech in Williamsburg to House Democrats undoubtedly carries some risk, as David Gergen pointed out tonight. But I think the moment called for it.

Frankly, I’ve found it a bit demoralizing to watch ideological conservatives claim that the stimulus package is nothing but a wasteful pork barrel bill – and nobody is on the television ready to fight back and defend it. Even though the grand total of objectionable pork barrel items pointed out by House Republicans amounted to about 1% of the whole bill, all we kept hearing about the last few days was STD spending and sodding the mall. It’s a classic GOP tactic – find one random item and hold it up as evidence that the entire bill is supposedly wasteful.

Obama has had enough of that. He recognizes that there are a small handful of Senate Republicans who will work with conservative Democrats to pare down some of the spending and get it passed. Yet, the opposition has come primarily from ideologues who think we shouldn’t be spending anything at all. It was that outdated ideology that lost in the 2008 election. And Obama is right to remind voters that there is a deep philosophical divide here that cannot be bridged by more bipartisanship.

This is the speech that many Democrats thought he should have given days ago. I know that I, a Democrat, am much more energized to defend the bill than I was before. I’m sure conservative Republicans will feel miffed. So be it.

Obama won the right to try it his way. If he fails, the Democrats will rightly get pummeled in 2010. That’s how democracy works.

UPDATE: Watch Obama’s full speech on this video here.