In the current New Yorker, George Packer quotes David Frum's new book, Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, as follows:

If Republican politicians quote Reagan, their political operatives study Nixon... Republicans have been reprising Nixon's 1972 campaign against McGovern for a third of a century. As the excesses of the 1960s have dwindled into history, however, the 1972 campaign has worked less and less well.

Tell it to John "Swift Boat" Kerry. But I digress.

Frum goes on: "How many more elections can conservatives win by campaigning against Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale? Voters want solutions to the problems of today."

That's high-minded David Frum, thinking positively about how the wonders of "the market" will solve all the problems it's failed to solve for the last, oh, century. Republicans, it follows, need to become the high-road party, zooming away that muddy old low-road ditch where Nixon Way flows into Rove Alley. Not having read Comeback, I'll take George Packer's word for it that Frum's positive ideas represent "a candid change of heart from a writer who, in [his 1994 book Dead Right] called Republican efforts to compete with Clinton's universal-health-coverage plan 'cowardly.'" Perhaps, in Frum's book, it's time to rouse interest in a Republican Party that might improve on George W. Bush, about whom Frum wrote in his previous book, The Right Man: "His vision was large and clear." Clear. Can Frum tear himself away from the large and clear vision of the man he not so long go considered "right"? It would seem he's still a "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists" kind of guy.

Facing an actual political campaign where his current (see my last paragraph below if you can't bear the suspense) candidate is in trouble, Frum recently finds it timely to note that neither the health care disgrace, nor a miserable war, nor the prospects of more miserable wars, nor a floundering economy, nor a meltdown of housing and glaciers, nor the depredations of an all-around ruinous regime that has shoved the nation's reputation into a quagmire but...patriotism is the problem. Yes, Frum wrote last week:

Patriotism is an important background theme in this election year. The Democrats are likely to nominate a presidential candidate whose pastor has called on God to damn America and whose wife confesses that she has never in her life till now felt proud of her country. The candidate himself belittles flags and other symbols of nationhood as false and meaningless. Obama's supporters of course bitterly resent any questions about the patriotism issue. But they could also use some answers.

He goes on to state three main gripes with my account of patriotism in my 2006 book The Intellectuals and the Flag.

The first is that I "bring scant moral energy" to the subject of left-wing anti-Americanism; that "like Obama, who could never muster any shock or indignation until Rev. Wright ceased denouncing America and started criticizing him, Gitlin's patriotism excuses, condones, and still inwardly sympathizes with anti-patriotism."

I had thought I might have expended enough moral energy over the years, not to mention chapters and verses, on the stupidities of the Left, as in hundreds of pages in my book, The Sixties, with some more moral energy left over for Letters to a Young Activist , to satisfy the morally lavish David Frum, but silly me. Maybe I'm too effete to care with the same quanta of uplifting moral energy that he can bring to bear on the subject of, say, the axis of evil.

I must have been too busy excusing and condoning to address Frum's second charge, that the patriotism I advocate is "a patriotism without content and without qualities. In this again, he reminds me of Obama." I suppose Frum was too busy whipping his moral energies into shape to notice the parts of my essay where I distinguish between symbolic patriotism (pins and magnetic ribbons ready, everyone?) and the genuine article, which requires shared public life and "is not enacted strictly by being expressed in symbolic fashion. It is with effort and sacrifice, not pride or praise, that citizens honor the democratic covenant"; or the passage where I quoted the political theorist John Schaar to the effect that patriotism "is more than a frame of mind. It is also activity guided by and directed toward the mission established in the founding covenant." Or...well, you get the point, if you're not David Frum.

Finally, in an appendage Frum calls a third point, he says: "Like Obama in his Philadelphia race speech, Gitlin tries to distinguish between the fearfully flawed United States as it is - and the reformed country into which the United States might evolve." Not such a bad idea, you might think, but Frum attributes to me the view that "It is the latter, hypothetical, country that deserves patriotic affection. But there is this one problem: that hypothetical country does not as yet exist. This is not patriotism - it is a wish fantasy. And it is this wish fantasy, this shrinking from realities, this attempt to let phrases do the work of real ideas, that is the ultimate failure not just of a single book, but of the whole new approach to patriotism that this book and the Obama campaign attempts to sell a rightly skeptical America."

Well. Perhaps Frum did not study so much American history while a bright young lad in his native land of Canada. Or perhaps there is some other reason why he misses my argument that "the reformed country into which the United States might evolve," the America of which I write is an America that I haven't made up, but an America with deep, deep roots that might be summarized in the names Tom Paine, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Eugene Debs, Walter Reuther, Martin Luther King....

Try as he may to take a walk on the high road, Frum is an inveterate treason-hunter. On the brink of war in 2003, he accused the likes of Patrick Buchanan and Robert Novak, conservatives who opposed the Iraq adventure, of being (what else?) "unpatriotic conservatives" making "war against America," since "they have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe. They deny and excuse terror."

A bare six months ago, Frum signed on as "senior policy advisor" (are there any junior policy advisors?) to Rudy Giuliani. After Rudy's crash and burn, he has to settle for second best--John "Bomb-Bomb-Iran" McCain. Like McCain, he masters the art of claiming to perform straight talk with crooked tongue.