Afternoon Must-Read: Jonathan Cohn: Obama’s Immigration Order: A Vote for American Exceptionalism

is something Obama’s critics claim he doesn’t believe in. ‘Our president doesn’t have the same feelings about American exceptionalism that we do,’ Mitt Romney said during the 2012 presidential campaign. In a 2010 cover story in National Review, Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru declared, ‘At the heart of the debate over Obama’s program is the survival of American exceptionalism.’… One consistent feature of exceptionalist discourse has been the idea that America permits greater upward mobility than does the Old World…. In recent decades, sadly, the reality of American mobility has diverged sharply from the myth…. America, Marco Rubio said a few years back, ‘is the only economy in the world where poor people with a better idea and a strong work ethic can compete and succeed against rich people in the marketplace.’ That’s not actually true. But it’s truer today than it was last week because the president who supposedly wants to make America more like Europe has instead made America more like its best vision of itself.