The Romney campaign's mishandling of its candidate's Bain experience and tax returns has allowed Democrats to lump Romney into that un-American group. After years of insinuations about the president's heritage, the White House is getting to have its own nationalist fun at Romney's -- and his singing's -- expense.

After years of insinuations about the president's heritage, the White House is getting to have its own nationalist fun at Romney's -- and his singing's -- expense.

That's a change. Historically, Republicans have been the most obvious about and most effective at running nationalist campaigns, dating back to the Cold War. The September 11 attacks revived unease about the outside world -- an unease that has been politically exploited since. For over a decade, it has been one example after another: from the silly -- freedom fries, suggestions that 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry "looks French " -- to the more serious, including persistent doubts about Obama's birthplace and religion, worries about Shariah law and mosques, and, even with some Republican pushback, Michele Bachmann's latest (false) conspiracy theory about the State Department's Huma Abedin. Even independent debunkings -- for example, independent factcheckers labeled the claim that Obama had gone on an "apology tour" "pants on fire" false and asserted it "never happened" -- have not been enough to put these slanders to rest for good.

The pattern was set to continue this cycle. George W. Bush's former political strategist Karl Rove, who was among the first to suggest that Obama had gone on a global apology tour, and current Romney adviser Ed Gillespie recommended that Republicans adopt a "confident, nationalist tone emphasizing American exceptionalism, expressing pride in the United States" to counter Obama's perceived strength in foreign policy and, surely, to capitalize on the tenacious belief that Obama is somehow not fully American.

But Republicans did not need the advice. The evidence includes: Romney's latest speech at the VFW, his slogan "Believe in America," suggestion after suggestion that Obama is turning the United States into Europe, repeated assertions that Obama does not "believe in American exceptionalism," the argument that Obama believes the nation is "in decline," and the recent, walked back, slam from a top Romney surrogate that Obama needs to "learn how to be an American."

Some have decried the smallness of this year's debate while others have hoped a new, more substantive chapter is about to begin. And if the deepest the debate goes is "you're un-American" vs. "no, you're un-American," there will surely be even darker days between now and November. But for too long, the United States has failed to have a conversation about what globalization and an evolving global balance of power and the threats and crises inherent in both mean for the nation and its citizens. This has allowed politicians of both parties to exploit America's reactions to crises.

While ugly, perhaps a nationalist debate could be the American way of starting that deeper national conversation about what it can and should mean to be America and an American in this still young century.