Obama and the fall of America

Andrew has an interesting post on the efforts to label Obama as a pessimist:

It seems to me that if "optimism" means always saying that America has never fallen or failed, then Ronald Reagan was an inveterate pessimist. His campaign in 1980 was premised on the notion that America had objectively declined as a nation under the hapless presidency of Carter. His optimism was about how to improve that. How, after all, could it have been "morning in America" if it had never been night?

The trick is to be optimistic about America as a country--as an idea--while being very pessimistic about America under its current stewardship. One needs to believe in Americans themselves, while convincing us that we are ill-led. This is why Phil Gramm's "nation of whiners' remark is a killer--it attacks the people themselves. This idea being floated that Obama is a pessimist really smells like an effort to conflate a skepticism of Republican polices with a skepticism of America as a country. In other words--more of the same.