Does Obama love Sutter's Mill? America demands an answer.

When I think about all the hoops Barack Obama is being made to jump through in order to prove he's a patriotic American, I feel nostalgic for the days when the press thought Obama's biggest negative was his supposed inexperience relative to Hillary Clinton (see "Hillary's Experience Lie").

First Obama had to distance himself from some bizarre comments made by his former pastor. Then he had to explain why he doesn't wear a flag lapel pin often enough to suit Charlie Gibson of ABC News. Then he had to distance himself from a former member of the Weather Underground to whom he was introduced when he decided to run for the Illinois Senate but with whom he has since had scant contact. Then he had to distance himself from Hamas, a terrorist organization he has repeatedly condemned, simply because its chief political adviser, Ahmed Yousefat, expressed admiration for him. Now Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal demands that Obama demonstrate he carries sufficient love within his breast for … Sutter's Mill.

I'm not making this up. Here is what Noonan wrote:

Hillary Clinton is not Barack Obama's problem. America is Mr. Obama's problem. He has been tagged as a snooty lefty, as the glamorous, ambivalent candidate from Men's Vogue, the candidate who loves America because of the great progress it has made in terms of racial fairness. Fine, good. But has he ever gotten misty-eyed over … the Wright Brothers and what kind of country allowed them to go off on their own and change everything? How about D-Day, or George Washington, or Henry Ford, or the losers and brigands who flocked to Sutter's Mill, who pushed their way west because there was gold in them thar hills? There's gold in that history.

Let me pause here to point out that if Barack Obama were ever to refer to the '49ers of the California gold rush—even with affection—as "losers and brigands," then Sean Hannity would demand his immediate impeachment from the Senate, Bill Kristol would cite it as evidence that Obama was a member of the Communist Party, and Noonan herself would grieve over this condescension toward the starry-eyed dreamers who constitute the heart, soul, and viscera of this proud land.

I'm sure Obama is as sentimental as the next guy about the Wright brothers and D-Day and George Washington (to whom he is distantly related). Henry Ford is a harder case. On the one hand, he is the father of mass production and the inventor of the Model T. On the other hand, he was a raving anti-Semite. Between 1920 and 1922, Ford published in the Dearborn Independent, which he owned, no fewer than 81 articles on what he called "The Jewish Problem in America." These screeds were so odious that they prompted the resignation of the Dearborn Independent'seditor, who refused to print them. Ford's rants about the international Jewish conspiracy, published in book form, were a formative influence on Baldur von Schirach *, leader of the Hitler Youth, according to von Schirach's testimony at the Nuremberg Trials. One of these books—The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem—has been posted online by the American Nazi Party. At the very least, such affinities make it a challenge to love both Ford and D-Day, the Allied invasion that ultimately landed Ford's most influential disciple in Spandau prison for 20 years.

But I digress. Of this golden history, Noonan continues:

John McCain carries it in his bones. Mr. McCain learned it in school, in the Naval Academy, and, literally, at grandpa's knee. Mrs. Clinton learned at least its importance in her long slog through Arkansas, circa 1977-92.

Please note the presumption that it is impossible to acquire affection for the history of the United States in the states of Illinois, Massachusetts, or Connecticut, where Hillary Clinton lived before she lived in Arkansas. Conservatives long ago managed to establish as unchallengeable fact that the real America cannot be found in the places where a majority of its population resides. Exceptions are made for the greater Washington, D.C., area only when the persons involved belong to the U.S. military. No, America's authentic heart beats only in the states where people are scarce, for the simple reason that the few people you do find there tend to be Republicans. One would think this widely accepted (if faulty) proposition would benefit Obama, since he hails from the sparsely populated state of Hawaii. But conservatives don't recognize Hawaii as the real America (Vermont has this problem, too) because its inhabitants tend to vote Democratic. Never mind that it was a foreign power's deadly attack on Hawaii that brought the U.S. into World War II. *

Noonan continues: