That’s quite a front page of the Daily News with a picture of the President and a headline “The American.” It mimics a poster for the television show “The Americans,” which is about two Russ agents posing as a married couple in Washington. The News’ story is about Mayor Giuliani’s jibe that President Obama doesn’t love his country or think like an American, owing to the fact that he was brought up by a leftist family and was close to a family friend who was a communist.

We’d like to think that this offers a teaching moment in our political discourse. There’s no doubt in our mind that Mr. Obama does love his country. We’re not scared off by the fact that he associated with communists or even by the reports that as a youth he was particularly close to, in Frank Marshall Davis, a communist; a lot of Americans loved their country even though they were communists, though the brave among them abandoned communism once its evil result had become clear.

Neither is there any doubt in our mind, though, that Mr. Giuliani speaks for an enormous number of Americans, and not just Republicans, who are, to put it charitably, mystified by Mr. Obama. They find it hard to explain, or at least share, his aloofness. They wonder to what can be attributed his failure to lead. He has truckled to our enemies. He has brought our relations with Israel to their lowest point. He is treating with the Iranian mullahs in the fashion of Chamberlain. Mr. Giuliani is not the only one who is stumped by this.

Mr. Giuliani stood by his remarks during a broadcast with Megyn Kelly, who did a particularly good job of questioning America’s Mayor. She understood the seriousness of questioning, in effect, a president’s patriotism. But she also marked the hypocrisy of his critics, such as the cladium congresswoman Deborah Wasserman Schultz, who thought nothing of questioning President George W. Bush’s patriotism but has gone into paroxysms of indignation over Mr. Giuliani’s demarche.

Soon enough we will be into the thick of the 2016 election. Then in respect of the international crisis there will be put to the Democrats the kind of question Ronald Reagan put to another vacillating president, Jimmy Carter, in respect of the economy — namely, are we better off today than we were eight years ago? It’s going to be difficult for the Democrats to answer that question in the affirmative, even if we stipulate that Mr. Obama loves his country and that he thinks as much like an American as the rest of those who elected him.