Despite academic refutation, despite a long track record of presidents avoiding it in their rhetoric, and despite a decade of challenges and frustrations that have left the nation struggling at home and abroad, it is springtime for the idea of American exceptionalism. And it is not just Obama and those vying to oppose him in 2012. Former President Bill Clinton admitted in his new book, despite his not using the phrase during his presidency, "I do believe in American exceptionalism. My life has been graced by it."

American exceptionalism is really just another name for a particular version of American nationalism. American nationalism is stirring -- and being stirred -- for a number of reasons. Its reawakening has complicated the foreign policy politics for the Obama administration and its Republican challengers.

One possible reason that American nationalism is booming could be the nation's recent struggles. Andrew Sullivan suggested as much. A decade of frustrations in war and the economy, have led, as another Pew poll rightly found, to doubts about the nation. Having surely learned from President Jimmy Carter's infamous (if mislabeled) "malaise" speech, today's political leaders, when faced with a crisis in American expectations and beliefs, want to be seen as cheerleaders rather than doomsayers. They cheer most loudly when their team is down a few points. In his 2010 State of the Union, President Obama declared, "I do not accept second place for the United States of America."

Nationalism is not an unusual means of uniting a divided population, especially one as frustrated by economic difficulties, political challenges, and foreign setbacks as America's. In the 1970s, the exceptionalist rhetoric of such candidates as Ronald Reagan appealed to a country overcome by the nation's failure in Vietnam and beset by domestic challenges. While correlation does not always equal causation, the timing of exceptionalism's resurgence in the lead-up to the 2008 campaign suggests the nation's struggles were a driving force in the resurgence.

That timing also points to another likely reason behind this emerging trend: American politics. Republican candidates are pursuing a nationalist campaign against Obama. Because it makes for effective politics, the Republican candidates, as they have the past few years, will continue to argue that Obama is not proud enough and does not believe the nation is exceptional even if they do not use the word -- for example, Romney's "just another nation" comment. Last fall, the Washington Post suggested that, in the 2012 presidential election, the issue of American exceptionalism has already become a "new front in the ongoing culture wars." Spencer Ackerman recently made a similar point.

Nationalism-as-opposition-politics has been a rich and successful tradition in political history. "Birtherism" is based, in part, in the idea that Obama's policies are alien to American tradition. This attack leverages the perception held by some that Obama is, as a Hillary Clinton campaign adviser put it during the Democratic primary, "not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values" -- though both Clinton and, to a large degree, Republican nominee Senator John McCain rejected this approach. Again, this is not new in American politics; Republicans leveraged doubts about the foreign-ness and Greek ethnicity of Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis in 1988.