I think there are effective critiques of Obama’s understanding of patriotism, but Jonah Goldberg’s isn’t one of them.  Who is a patriot in his view?  He tells us:

We might need to change this or that policy or law, fix this or that problem, but at the end of the day the patriotic American believes that America is fundamentally good as it is. 

According to Goldberg, Obama doesn’t believe this.  In support of this claim, he mostly refers to the ridiculous moments of excessive rhetoric in the campaign and the embarrassing worship of the man that many of his supporters practice, none of which really proves his case.  Is Obama too full of himself, and is his campaign a cavalcade of delusional personality cultists?  Yes.  Does that make them insufficiently patriotic?  That’s not obvious.  It is unfortunate for Goldberg that his column came out the day after Obama gave his patriotism speech, since the speech completely devastates Goldberg’s thesis.  Among other things, Obama said:

I believe those who attack America’s flaws without acknowledging the singular greatness of our ideals, and their proven capacity to inspire a better world, do not truly understand America.

And again:

As we begin our fourth century as a nation, it is easy to take the extraordinary nature of America for granted.

And again:

As I got older, that gut instinct – that America is the greatest country on earth – would survive my growing awareness of our nation’s imperfections….Not only because, in my mind, the joys of American life and culture, its vitality, its variety and its freedom, always outweighed its imperfections, but because I learned that what makes America great has never been its perfection but the belief that it can be made better. 

So, in other words, Obama does believe that America is fundamentally good and great, but can be made better.  I find both the exceptionalist and the meliorist aspects of this view to be misguided and troubling, but if the standard that Goldberg wants to set is a belief in the “fundamental goodness” of America he cannot very well claim that Obama does not meet that standard.