Some conservative critics of Barack Obama dismiss him as an ineffective, confused president–no surprise, in their view, since his thin résumé showed from the beginning that he was unqualified for the job. Others, much farther to the right, circulate spooky theories about Obama: that he’s a secret Muslim, a friend to terrorists, an un-American, foreign-born Other holding his office illegally. In his important new book, I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism, Charles Kesler provides a conservative reading of the Obama presidency that is neither dismissive nor conspiratorial. Instead, he sees Obama as the latest presidential exemplar of a liberal political tradition that for a century has worked to transform the American constitutional order in ways that would make it unrecognizable to the Founding Fathers. And Obama knows what he is doing, Kesler believes. The president, he warns, “is playing a long, high-stakes game, and it’s not at all clear he’s losing.”
