It's evident that Mrs. Obama doesn't love or even much like America. Among politicians today, though, who does? So far as I can tell, Mr. Bush, Mrs. Clinton, and Mr. McCain mostly love winning and their careers. Any other kind of person wouldn't run for president or get engaged in something as unpleasantly partisan and money-grubbing as national politics today. Bush believes in open borders and global wars for democracy. McCain mostly goes along with that, maybe with less emphasis on democracy and more on America as a military concept. And Mrs. Clinton mostly identifies with a technocratic ruling class that knows no frontiers.
I suppose that's part of Mr. Obama's appeal, that he hasn't been in such bad company or chosen to live in such an amoral world for quite so long. People think that he might somehow actually represent them. What he mostly stands for though is the fantasy of somehow transcending the sordidness of the real. What does that have to do with loving anything that actually exists?
To love America is not to love its success and power, or the possibility that it might become different from what it is, or an abstract ideal that it's never lived up to and never will. It's to love the American people and their way of life, with all their good and bad points, just as they are and have been. It sits comfortably with a desire to make things better, but not with the view that the past, apart from past attempts to change things, is at bottom shameful, and that what America most needs is to import a bunch of replacement Americans.
I don't think it's possible for a legitimate figure in national politics to love America today. To love America is to love a particular people and place, and to love a particular people is exclusionary and racist, while to love one shopping mall over another and make that the basis of anything serious is rather silly. It should be obvious, though, that silly racists can't be legitimate participants in public life.