Making progressivism patriotic

David Kusnet writes in The New Republic of a commencement speech U.S. Sen. Barack Obama delivered at Knox College, a small campus in small-town Illinois, recently:

"All Obama did was make the best case for liberal politics in recent memory, with a panoramic view of American history that made public investment in job training and new technologies sound like the logical descendents of the Civil Rights movement, the New Deal, the Progressive Era, the abolitionists, and the American Revolution.

"Unlike most contemporary liberal orators, Obama avoided a numbing list of the government programs he supports, grim indictments of the social injustices he lamented, or cumbersome quotations from the heroes he invoked. Instead, he emphasized two ideas that Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Martin Luther King used but that today's liberals have foolishly ceded to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush: individual responsibility and American exceptionalism."

The speech.

The New Republic article.