If there's one thing that bugs me about the Obama years it is the palpable fact that Obama doesn't love America. The last two weeks has intensified that feeling.

We know why he doesn't love America. It's because he identifies with his Kenyan father's hatred of Western colonialism. If that weren't enough, Obama follows the cultural cues of liberal America, from his lefty mother to his lefty teenage mentors to his lefty college instructors to his lefty radical sponsors in Chicago. Liberals think they are too good for America. Ditto Obama.

Liberals are above things like patriotism, which they demonize as nationalism. Meanwhile liberals want to turn the clock back to tribalism with the reactionary politics they call "identity politics."

Liberals sneer at religion, while practicing the most debased and bloody religions ever invented -- socialism and communism.

And liberals demonize individualism, the notion of the responsible self that undergirds our Western culture. Instead they worship creativity, and reckon that a creative artist is a cut above the ordinary run of humanity.

When you reckon yourself a cut above the rest of humanity it's nothing to upend the regular order of congressional appropriations with periodic shutdown crises and visit bureaucratic conceits like ObamaCare upon a suffering nation. You might try that too if you were a cut above.

But I don't think myself a cut above America. I just love America.

I'll always remember the first day I began to love America. It was on my first morning in America when I woke up after flying from London to Denver for Christmas in 1965. I watched the sun rise into the crystal clear sky east of mile high Denver and I fell in love.

Who was the last Democratic president that really loved America? Harry Truman? I'd say it was probably Lyndon Johnson.

We know that President Carter thought himself -- thinks himself -- a cut above the country that elected him and had the nerve to unelect him. And Bill Clinton? Who knows what the old rascal really thinks? But we know Hillary; she's a standard issue elite liberal come to lord it over us.

The recent Republican presidents, whatever their faults, loved America. We love Ronald Reagan because his every speech from "The Speech" to the farewell address shone with a love for America. Imagine the love in George W. Bush, scourged on the cross of ritual liberal anathema for eight long years.

It's a real advantage in a president to love America. It means that he doesn't think beyond the idea of serving America. He doesn't think, like Bill Clinton in his final year, about his "legacy." He doesn't truck with the poisonous idea of "fundamental transformation."

Speaking about fundamental transformation, what has the left ever produced in the realm of political ideas, from Marx to Marcuse, except crude apologies for elite domination?

What could possess anyone to imagine, given the settled science about the limits of government administration, that the political systematization of health care could surpass the self-organizing capabilities of people voluntarily offering and consuming and improving health care services? You are right: only the blindest and most corrupted of political and economic science deniers could ever proceed to coerce their fellow Americans into such compulsion.

But I have a hope. It is a hope that the leading Republican contenders for the presidency in 2016 are flat out

America lovers. And why wouldn't they be? Take Ted Cruz. Son of an immigrant that fled Castro's Cuba at age 18 and whose land yet toils under the lash of the Castro brothers and their fundamental transformation of Cuba, Ted Cruz is an unapologetic 100 percent American. Says he:

"Every day, I jump out of bed with a smile on my face, because it is a joy to have the opportunity to stand with the American people and work to help restore people's faith and optimism in our nation," he concludes. "It's an incredible honor to play a small role in expanding the American dream."

On this view, you can see, America could never need fundamental transformation, because politics is expressed as the act of standing with the American people, restoring their existing faith in the American Dream, and then letting them get on with it.

A president who loves America would unite us rather than divide us. A president who loves America would negotiate rather than hold the nation's credit hostage. A president who loves America would do something about entitlements. A president who loves America would make a bonfire of the pile of subsidies and the injustices that divide rich from poor, black from white, employers from employees, men from women in Obama's America.
A president who loves America. Is it really so much to ask?

Christopher Chantrill (mailto:chrischantrill@gmail.com) is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. See his usgovernmentspending.com and also usgovernmentdebt.us. At americanmanifesto.org he is blogging and writing An American Manifesto: Life After Liberalism. Get his Road to the Middle Class.