Should we have a Non-White President?

Let's face it, American History has been very kind to white people (like me) and kind of harsh on non-white people (like, say, Barack Obama). And Mona Charen's latest article supposes that Barack Obama doesn't really love America, because of his experiences, which she reads in his memoir.

Left-wing ideas are not so much articulated in this memoir as presumed. Obama has claimed that his experience living abroad gives him a valuable perspective for a chief executive. Yet his reflections on the effect Western capitalism has had on Jakarta and Chicago's south side sound like warmed over Herbert Marcuse. "How could we go about stitching a culture back together after it was torn? How long might it take in this land of dollars? The very existence of the factories, the timber interests, the plastics manufacturer, will have rendered their [Indonesian] culture obsolete; the values of hard work and individual initiative turn out to have depended on a system of belief that's been scrambled by migration and urbanization and imported TV reruns."

. . . One suspects that beneath the soothing talk, there is bitterness in the man that we'd best learn more about before voting.

So seeing problems in America is a bitterness we need to be careful about? Well what non-White in America is going to be completely non-bitter about America? Alan Keyes?

And there's the rub. To be a liberal is to want to improve America, to make it better. The desire to improve America implies it needs improving, that it's not working quite right. And for Liberals, this sort of means they don't love America.

Conservatives, of course, can lay all sorts of attacks on America without being accused of a lack of love for this nation. This is because Conservatives have the audacity to suggest that their political enemies don't love America, and Liberals, in large measure, don't.