QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 10:49 A.M. ET:  In one of the best columns I've ever read about Barack Obama, scholar Shelby Steele nails the president and what's wrong with him.  What's wrong with him, in brief, is that he doesn't accept the very premise of the United States of America:

Anti-exceptionalism has clearly shaped his "leading from behind" profile abroad—an offer of self-effacement to offset the presumed American evil of swaggering cowboyism. Once in office his "hope and change" campaign slogan came to look like the "hope" of overcoming American exceptionalism and "change" away from it.

So, in Mr. Obama, America gained a president with ambivalence, if not some antipathy, toward the singular greatness of the nation he had been elected to lead.

But then again, the American people did elect him. Clearly Americans were looking for a new kind of exceptionalism in him (a black president would show America to have achieved near perfect social mobility). But were they also looking for—in Mr. Obama—an assault on America's bedrock exceptionalism of military, economic and cultural pre-eminence?

American exceptionalism is, among other things, the result of a difficult rigor: the use of individual initiative as the engine of development within a society that strives to ensure individual freedom through the rule of law. Over time a society like this will become great. This is how—despite all our flagrant shortcomings and self-betrayals—America evolved into an exceptional nation.

COMMENT:  Wonderfully stated.  And I think that critique defines, not only Obama, but the people around him, and the people in the press and the universities who support him.  They really don't much like their country.  When they speak of "change" they're speaking about things so basic that they go to the core values of this country.

And anyone who tries to question them is called anti-intellectual, a warmonger, a racist, or a McCarthyite.  Welcome to the world of intelligent discussion. 

September 2, 2011