It seems that conservatives will lob two major critiques at Barack Obama this election cycle. Straight from Nixonland, the first is based in what Mark Schmitt has called the identity politics of Americaness. Obama shouldn't lead this country because he's too cosmopolitan, too out of touch, too divorced from "our experiences." In short, he's not "The American President Americans Are Waiting For."

The second meme is one of experience, substance, and presentation. While Obama can electrify a crowd, his opponents argue, his foreign policy vision is naive and his rhetoric hollow. As Hillary Clinton so fiercely put it, he hasn't crossed the "commander-in-chief threshold." For two different examples of this line of argument, look no further than columns today by the Tribune's John Kass and The New York Times' David Brooks.

Let's start with Kass and his insinuation-heavy piece on Obama and Tony Rezko:

Obama's supporters don't know exactly what Obama believes in, but they seem not to care. He's on the way up and out of the wetlands of Chicago politics, reborn unto his national and mythic reform narrative, discovered by joyous national media and embraced, much as the iconic child was discovered and embraced when found in the reed basket floating on the River Potomac.

Right, John. Media brainwashing accounts for why millions of Americans might support a candidate who holds the majority position on the war, health care, and the environment. Let's just ignore that he expressed his positions clearly on the stump, as your own paper wrote on February 24:

For a speaker who is best known for his lofty and airy rhetoric, it's an ironic reality that Obama's public appearances very often turn into drawn-out dissertations.

In fact, read side-by-side with the other candidates' current stump speeches, the Obama script makes at least as many references to policy proposals as do theirs.

To Brooks' credit, before calling Obama "politically astute ... but substantively vague," he actually takes the time to dig into Obama's approach on a crucial issue -- education. But he crudely divides the education reform crowd into two camps -- status quo and reformers -- without considering that both approaches have valuable insights as well as some shortfalls, which Obama's position reflects.

Beyond that, Brooks' fatal mistake is choosing education as his proxy in the first place. How can he fault Obama for not being specific enough when John McCain has literally no thoughts on education at all? I guess you can't be "vague" if you don't say anything on the topic.

Let's be clear: Conservative orthodoxy has failed us. It'll be a shame if identity politics or baseless critiques about substance deliver four more years of it.