In an interview with The Guardian newspaper, Sen. Elizabeth Warren may have uttered the most consequential words from any Democrat since the 2016 election. Discussing the state of the U.S. economy, Warren declared:

“I think President Obama, like many others in both parties, talks about a set of big national statistics that look shiny and great but increasingly have giant blind spots,” she says. “That GDP, unemployment, no longer reflect the lived experiences of most Americans. And the lived experiences of most Americans is that they are being left behind in this economy. Worse than being left behind, they’re getting kicked in the teeth.”

First of all, Warren echoes a bipartisan complaint that economic statistics don’t really give a sufficiently full or detailed picture of Americans’ working lives. They don’t measure whether a person’s new job is playing less than the old job they lost, or whether they feel like they can’t afford as much at the grocery store as they used to, or whether their community is enduring a plague of opioid addiction and overdoses.

The national unemployment number of 4.5 percent is obviously the easiest shorthand for discussing the national economy overall, but job hunters in Ames, Iowa and the surrounding area (an unemployment rate 2.1 percent!) are much happier than those in Rockford, Illinois (9 percent) Bakersfield (10.9 percent) and Merced, California (12.4 percent). An economy that is doing pretty well overall can have some communities and regions suffering economic collapse and misery – or as Trump put it, “American carnage.”

For obvious reasons, most Democrats wanted to believe that President Obama’s economic policies were unqualified successes and that their decisions were vindicated. As Obama put it at the GOP convention, “we’ve fought our way back. We’ve seen deficits come down, 401(k)s recover, an auto industry set new records, unemployment reach eight-year lows, and our businesses create 15 million new jobs. By so many measures, our country is stronger and more prosperous than it was when we started.” Clearly, a significant number of Americans dismissed that as happy talk.

Now, out of office for about four months, it is apparently safe for Democrats to assert that in the Obama era, “most Americans” were “getting kicked in the teeth.” (See if there’s strong pushback from Obama loyalists in the coming days.) This may stir a really intense, and sometimes hostile discussion in Democratic circles about what Obama’s true legacy was and how much the party should emulate his approach on economics in the future. While it’s possible this will push the Democrats even further to the left than Obama’s approach, it’s better for the country if both parties have a clear-eyed view of how the economy is performing and which Americans are struggling to find better opportunities.