Marc Ambinder:

Newt Gingrich Is So Off, He's Not Even Wrong - Politics - The Atlantic: Obama told his friend that growing up in Indonesia, he came to know the fundamental limits of American power as exercised simply because he saw people whose life America had never touched. He saw a culture (and subcultures) that struggled to become more like America when they began to learn about the great country. Where his worldview is unique, he told his friend, is that he probably has a better sense of what actually happens when America, the country or its culture, touches another people.

So, yes, he incorporated his outsider's view of America into his American view of its power. Arguably, a president with a sense of America's limits -- not negatives, but limits -- is something that a small-c conservative would respect. When Obama speaks about the interests of other countries and is keen on making sure that other countries' peoples feel like they can live in a world with America (and not just against America), the young Indonesian Obama (born, of course, in Hawaii) is influencing the adult American President.

Now is not the time to make the case that Obama's policies are profoundly within the tradition of American political liberalism, or that his health care proposal explicitly rejected socialism, or that the economy was falling off a cliff and even Republican economists wanted a demand-side injection ... or that, perhaps, one of the reasons why Obama is suddenly hesitant about oil drilling is because it turns out that the oil drilling regime is much less regulated than Obama believed when he expressed support for off-shore oil drilling before the BP disaster.

If you're looking for bones to pick with Obama and his policies, try his spending plans, his aim to make government effective and larger, his social liberalism, his unwillingness to extend the Bush tax cuts for the rich, his infrequent flights of populism, his preference for insurance industry reform (something that, ironically enough, many conservatives have long wanted, or HAD long wanted, because it would preserve the private health insurance system in America), the increase in deficits as a percentage of GDP, perhaps even his involuntary smile when he shook hands with Hugo Chavez -- these are all legitimate. It will be interesting for Gingrich to try to portray the President, who has sanctioned the expansion of CIA and special forces operations worldwide to hunt and kill anti-Western Islamic jihadists worldwide, as somehow blindly obeying a command by his unconsciousness to weaken America because he believes in socialism and in reducing America's power. From a global perspective, D'Souza's argument seems to be an effort to legitimize unformed beliefs about Obama's otherness ... to try to create an explanation for what people view as Obama's aberrant conduct that incorporates doubts about his fundamental American-ness. Newt Gingrich is an intensely smart man given to peregrinations of crazy. He can be a legitimate presidential candidate, or he can be a demagogue. For 2012, perhaps in this political climate, he is signaling that he is going to be both.