Obama hopeless when it comes to patriotism

Joe Klein:

When he was really rolling in February, Barack Obama would close every speech with a peroration about the importance of hope. The setup always seemed a bit defensive to me — an attack on the pundits and party elders who thought he was too idealistic, a "hopemonger" who needed to have the "hope boiled out of me." Having knocked down that straw man, he would soar through an American history of hope, from the colonists to civil rights marchers. It was the core of his message: patriotism defined as change, the creation of a more perfect union. And so it was rather shocking to hear Obama speak — stripped down and hope redacted — in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on April Fools' Day, his peroration transformed into a Clintonian pledge to get up every morning as President and devote himself to the single mothers, the laid-off workers, "the working families of Pennsylvania."

Obama did add his old hope riff at the end of a question-and-answer session later in Scranton, Pa., but it seemed an afterthought. The bulk of his presentation, especially the Q&A, was solid protein. He offered Hillaryesque, do-good details: If we return to the national obesity levels of 1980, it would save $1 trillion in health-care costs! He claimed that the mortgage-lending industry had spent $185 million on lobbying over the past decade, and Big Pharma had spent $1 billion. He gave comprehensive answers about trade, immigration and military procurement. He was detailed but never dull. He was, in fact, quite impressive — another sign that this is a candidate smart and supple enough to grow and adapt — even though the substance was buried by media accounts of his transparent common-man photo ops: bowling, watching the NCAA tournament in a bar, drinking Pennsylvania's legendary Yuengling beer.

There were signs that Obama's hard work and extensive television advertising were paying off: various polls showed the race tightening a bit. The talk-show muttering had migrated from Jeremiah Wright to Clinton's Bosnian sniper-fire fantasy. Hordes of new voters were registering in Pennsylvania. It was not impossible that Obama would turn Clinton's predicted victory into a closer-than-expected moral defeat.

But there was still something missing. I noticed it during Obama's response to a young man who remembered how the country had come together after Sept. 11 and lamented "the dangerously low levels of patriotism and pride in our country, the loss of faith in our elected officials." Obama used this, understandably, to go after George W. Bush. "Cynicism has become the hot stock," he said, "the growth industry during the Bush Administration." He talked about the Administration's mendacity, its incompetence during Hurricane Katrina, its lack of transparency. But he never returned to the question of patriotism. He never said, "But hey, look, we're Americans. This is the greatest country on earth. We'll rise to the occasion."

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No, he never says that, but it is part of McCain's stump speech and Klein is sending out a warning to Obama to do something about his patriotism deficit. It is one shared by many in the Democrat party. It was captured by Jean Kirkpatrick in her famous "blame America first" speech attacking the San Francisco Democrats. Obama is the product of their dislike of America.