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Taken from the Confederate Yankee([link]), for he's on the ball pretty well about this

Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama is on a tour across America designed to rehabilitate his reputation, after a CNN poll conducted on June 26-29 revealed that a surprising number of Americans—Democrats (10%), Independents (29%), and Republicans (40%), or 25% overall—say that the candidate lacks patriotism.

I must wonder how much a string of speeches will do to convince people that Obama loves America. They are, after all, "just words."

He certainly loves parts of America. San Francisco. Chicago. New York. D.C. University towns and union enclaves. Where left wing ideologies and identity politics hold sway, you'll find a part of America that Obama likes and understands.

The rest of the nation may as well be another world for the freshman Senator, as remote to him as the Indonesian schools of his youth are to the rest of us.

He doesn't seem to understand that the America outside of his comfort zone doesn't associate the sincerity or depth of love with this nation with fealty to the political party in charge at the time. He's used to seeing feckless American liberals threaten to leave the country if a Republican wins an election—though regrettably, few of these fickle souls live up to their word—and associates that as a normal behavior. Instead of "My country, right or wrong," his life story is a tale replete with a string of associates and mentors that boldly proclaim "my country, my way, or God damn you all."

Speeches are nice, and he certainly plays a teleprompter as lyrically as a human being can.

But Barack Obama has lived his life in the counterculture of America. He counts among his greatest influences a communist poet, a lynching advocate priest, a crackpot conspiracy-mongering reverend, and the detritus remnants of the last great experiment in American self-loathing.

The majority of Americans have been raised with a nearly instinctual love of this nation that is not tied to who resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and that doesn't associate pride or shame in their nation of birth solely on the policies and actions of elected officials that will blow away on an electoral wind.

The freshman Senator from Illinois is surprisingly insulated from the American experience, even as he claims to credit America for his success. He claims to believe in the America, but every policy he outlines, every dream he frames, is nailed to an ever-engorging government. A program for this. A policy for that. Restrictions here, entitlements all around, and a tax on both your houses to pay for it all.

Barack Obama is in love with the possibilities of American government. It's too bad he has so little trust in the American people.

The "mood thingie" is still buggy and doesn't seem to want to change.