Many Japanese are indeed discovering things to love about their country these days, but aikokushin, say worried liberals, implies devotion to a particular idea of Japan: as a uniquely entitled nation supported by hard-working but unquestioning citizens.
For a group of people – conservatives – who have spent the last six years lampooning liberals' supposed slavish devotion to Obama while holding themselves up as the party of fresh ideas and money smarts, rapturously applauding one woman's annual incoherently assembled platter of expired leftovers seems like a bad look.
But they also say many Jews struggle with the agonizing counter-pulls expressed by Ms. Rothman — devotion to liberal social policies but a primal, if to some irrational, sense that Republican hawks might be better for Israel.
"You've got to point to this as another case where a challenge has risen up and someone with no executive ability is again showing a devotion to liberal orthodoxy on taxes: exhibit #642 of a president who is totally without the ability to lead the country in the right direction," the Republican consultant said.
Liberal critics have long asserted that dogmatic devotion to market forces has skewed American society toward those of greatest means.
The administration's vastly expensive farm bill was another measure that no free-trader would care to defend.Despite Mr Zoellick, and the Bush administration's avowed devotion to the principles of liberal commerce, the record in practice is mixed.
Liberal citizenship at its peak, by contrast, requires devotion to the liberal institutions and democratically-enacted laws of the political community above all else.
The high-mindedness and subtlety on glorious display in Philadelphia last week won over the press, gave Obama enough breathing room to turn to Iraq and the economy, and intensified the devotion of the kind of educated liberal voter once drawn to Adlai Stevenson, who virtually created the type.
In this capacity, at the peak of his powers, he united in a harmonious whole his liberal convictions about social reform, his deep conservative devotion to the legacy of his nation's history, his unshakable resistance to tyranny from the right or from the left, and his capacity to look beyond Britain to the larger Atlantic community and the ultimate unity of Europe.
