This is an excellent article and Professor Kesler sums it up well with the following:
“Obama’s ambivalence is, in many ways, the perfect symbol of the dilemma of the contemporary liberal. How can Obama argue that America and liberalism reject absolute truths, and in the same breath affirm—as he did recently to the United Nations—that human rights are self-evidently true? You can’t have it both ways, though he desperately wants and tries to. Here, surely, is the deepest crisis of 20th-century American liberalism—that it can no longer understand, or defend, its principles as true anymore. “