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Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, although they spend a lot of time these days at one another’s throat, appeared on the night of the South Carolina primary to agree on at least one thing: Each believes in “American exceptionalism,” and, they say, Barack Obama does not. Gingrich has already devoted an entire book to the topic, and in an interview with my colleague David Rohde, a top foreign policy adviser to Romney made it clear that American exceptionalism is a theme that Romney intends to stress throughout the campaign.

It’s easy to see that these candidates view their own ideas about American exceptionalism as a strong opportunity to contrast themselves with the incumbent. It’s harder, though, after sifting through the various ways the term is used, to establish what it actually means. Far from being a simple concept that one can easily endorse or reject, American exceptionalism is a loose skein that uneasily unites many different strands of thought, faith and ideology.

Like so much in the discussion of American history, the phrase is often traced to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. But that doesn’t explain much, because when de Tocqueville wrote that “the position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional,” he was referring primarily to the development of a practical — as opposed to literary or artistic — worldview, stemming from the American landscape and the lack of an aristocracy. More to the point, Gingrich seeks to ground the term in the American Revolution: “The ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence, and the unique American identity that arose from an American civilization that honored them, form what we call today ‘American Exceptionalism’,” he wrote in A Nation Like No Other, published last year. But that explanation, too, is inadequate; after all, the authors of the Declaration of Independence went out of their way to universalize the values underpinning the American experience (“when, in the course of human events…”), not to cleave that experience off from the rest of the world.

Rather, the faith in the uniqueness of the American experience is best found in its Puritan heritage, the belief that God made a covenant with the founders of America and intended to use American civilization as an example for the rest of the world. In a much-cited speech, Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop referred in 1630 to his colony as “a city on a hill” that could serve as a beacon to the world. But grounding American exceptionalism in religion creates multiple conceptual minefields. For one, the early colonies were not really bastions of liberty; in addition to their slaveholdings, they were, as Gingrich acknowledges, governed like “a theocratic dictatorship.” For another, an appeal to the supernatural puts the idea of American exceptionalism on a similar plane with, say, the Jewish concept of being the Chosen People or the ancient Chinese idea that their country is at the center of the universe — which is to say, there is nothing exceptional about thinking that your civilization is exceptional. Nonetheless, the idea that the United States occupies a privileged and arguably unique place in history is critical to understanding the phrase “American exceptionalism,” from the Manifest Destiny period to the present day.

In the 20th century, American exceptionalism took on a particular meaning in political theory. Typically, it was used to explain why the United States — unlike nearly all developed nations — had never developed a significant working-class political movement. Curiously, although Gingrich and Romney are principally using it in the context of American foreign policy, that usage is of fairly recent vintage. It is also where the meaning of the term is probably the muddiest and does not make as neat a litmus test as Gingrich and Romney seem to want. One can believe that the foundation of America in ideas of liberty and self-governance — rather than in ethnicity or royal domain — makes the United States “exceptional” and yet still be deeply skeptical about America’s use of force abroad. Instead, what Gingrich and Romney appear to be advocating under the name of exceptionalism is either American unilateralism — the idea that the United States has a right and/or obligation to act in the international sphere even if all other countries and multinational institutions don’t join in — or American infallibility — the idea that nothing the United States does in the international arena is ever morally unjustified.

On such subtopics there is robust debate, particularly since 9/11. The Canadian scholar and politician Michael Ignatieff has identified three problematic areas of American exceptionalism in the international realm. These include American exemptionalism, the idea that prevailing international standards don’t apply to the U.S., particularly in the ratification of human rights conventions; double standards, the idea that rules will be ignored or enforced depending on the U.S. perception of its interests; and legal isolationism, the notion that legal findings outside the U.S. should have no bearing on how American judges rule and think.

Here is where Gingrich and Romney probably see a place they can sink their teeth into. It is nearly certain that current or former members of the Obama administration have publicly taken positions against “American exceptionalism” if it’s defined as unilateralism, infallibility, exemptionalism, etc. The political hope is that such parts can be made to stand for the whole and thus used as one more way to call out Obama’s supposed patriotism vacuum.

Ah, Tim Pawlenty.

The onetime Minnesota governor seemed for a little while like a promising candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. And then came the deadly Iowa straw poll last August, a contest whose meaninglessness has been confirmed by the fact that Michelle Bachmann won it, only to come in basically last–in her home state!–yesterday when the votes actually mattered (as much as they ever do in Iowa).

It’s safe to say that, while CNN sought the wisdom of departed candidate Herman Cain, and Fox the wisdom of not-quite-candidate Sarah Palin, T-Paw was not exactly overexposed on TV during the voting and counting.

So what exactly did Tim Pawlenty do yesterday? Reuters Opinion senior editor Chadwick Matlin has imagined the day, in this piece for nymag.com.

PHOTO: U.S. Republican presidential candidate and former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty speaks at the Iowa Straw Poll in Ames, Iowa, August 13, 2011. REUTERS/Jim Young

By James Ledbetter The opinions expressed are his own.

It seems entirely possible that Christopher Hitchens will be primarily remembered in America for his public atheism. I suspect Hitchens himself was surprised at how wildly popular God Is Not Great became, giving much-needed voice and ammunition to thousands of godless heathens in the land of the drive-through church.

Yet it’s an inadequate way to remember the man, and not because Hitchens did little more in that book than to lay some tracing paper on the Enlightenment’s best thinkers and draw giddily (though with acidic and often very funny ink), or because—this is not an exaggeration—the American public regards atheists on about the same level as rapists.

The problem is that splitting the atheism away from the body of Hitchens’s work debases it into a kind of rascally parlor trick—“Uncle Christopher, say the mean thing about Mother Teresa again!”—and distracts from the thorny paradox at the heart of Hitchens’s thinking. Which is: While certainly an enemy of superstition and an eager chronicler of the sins and idiocies of the world’s religions, Hitchens was actually a lifelong believer, if strictly in man-made gods. It is impossible to contemplate his prodigious and passionate writing without recognizing that it was always animated by crusades, holy men, and devils.

Indeed, the Hitchens universe was long populated by notions of absolute good and evil, stretching back to his days as a student Trotskyite. This tendency was tempered by a love of literature and the cocoon of irony that writers wrap around themselves. But Hitchens himself spoke of the struggle between the literal and ironic minds, and it is an aptly Hitchensian contradiction that the episode, I think, that created his own brand of fundamentalist was in defense of the ironic mind—in 1989, when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on Salman Rushdie for the supposed blasphemy of The Satanic Verses.

The importance of the Rushdie saga on Hitchens’s thinking cannot be overstated. “I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me,” he wrote in his splendid memoir, Hitch-22. “It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved.” This is of course a functional definition of evil and good. And there were obviously implications for the future, once Hitchens learned that among the Western left, it is entirely possible for well-meaning people, in the name of multicultural “understanding” or “tolerance” of non-Western societies, to overlook and even excuse atrocities and barbarism that would never be acceptable if perpetrated, say, by the Republican Party and its allies.

Few today would find fault with Hitchens’s stance or actions on behalf of Rushdie. But he began to apply the moral purity he derived from it to situations where the good-versus-evil ledger was not so neatly visible. From the mid- to late-’90s on, when the books on Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, and Henry Kissinger were published, the absolutism had pretty much taken over his work.

By James Ledbetter The views expressed are his own.

Which is stranger: the idea that on the campaign trail GOP presidential longshot Rick Santorum cites favorably a quotation from a quasi-Marxist social critic? Or that the quotation itself might be spurious?

For years, Rick Santorum has said that one of his favorite sayings is: “We all get up every day and tell ourselves lies so we can live.” He attributes it to the iconoclastic historian and social critic Christopher Lasch, best known as the author of The Culture of Narcissism, a hugely popular jeremiad against modern American capitalism published in 1979.

Santorum likes the quote enough to cite it in a variety of contexts. In 2004, he used it during a Senate debate to explain his opposition to same-sex marriage. In a Washington Post article this week, he appeared to use it to explain how he carries on a demanding, uphill campaign when he has a young daughter with a life-threatening disease whom he rarely gets to see.

The Santorum-Lasch nexis is odd  for at least two reasons. One is that Santorum typically positions himself as a pro-life, family-values conservative. By contrast, while it’s hard to quickly summarize Lasch’s views, he came out of the Marxist-influenced left and retained a strong distaste for American conservatism even as his own later views on some subjects–notably family, abortion, and various aspects of the women’s movement–alienated many former allies.

But more importantly, there is no easily available proof that Lasch said what Santorum attributes to him. A Google search for the specific quote shows a handful of references, but mainly from Santorum himself, and none with a specific citation to any Lasch book, article, or interview.  Popular online quotation aggregators, such as BrainyQuote, offer dozens of better-known Lasch observations–e.g., “Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values”–but not Santorum’s favorite. My colleague Paul Smalera suggests that it sounds more like the first line of Joan Didion’s book The White Album: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

The Santorum campaign isn’t much help. A Santorum staffer said in an e-mail “I know if you Google the quote it comes up,” but was not able over the course of several hours to provide a specific citation to any Lasch work.

By James Ledbetter The views expressed are his own.

Last year on a drizzly Seattle morning I visited the corporate headquarters of Starbucks to talk about social media. At the time, Starbucks had about 2 million of what were then called “fans” on its Facebook page. That audience was both large and engaged enough, a company representative said, that Starbucks had recently been approached by another firm that wanted to advertise specifically on the Starbucks Facebook page. Starbucks declined the offer, but only after serious consideration. “We had to decide if we really wanted to be on that side of the publishing business,” the representative told me.

It’s a striking reminder that in the Twitter-and-tablet age, not only can anyone become a publisher, but for big consumer-facing companies, the real question is: how much of a publisher do you want to be? The question carries an added weight when you consider how many traditional publishers these days are trying to exit that business.

Non-publishers becoming publishers is not new. For twenty years, the Italian clothing retailer Benetton has put out a magazine called Colors. Richard Branson had a buzzy launch for his “Project” magazine/app last year. One of the more ambitious and technologically sophisticated efforts of recent years has been American Express’s Open Forum which — in addition to aggregating (usually small-business-related) content published elsewhere — has commissioned videos from traditional media outlets and then distributed them through a Web ad platform. (I made a few such videos at a previous job.) The advantages are obvious: unlike an ad placed in a magazine or on TV, the company gets to control how much or little integration with the content it wants to have, or even control the content altogether.

Yet even with such precedents, it’s rare to see something as sweeping as the Web site Société Perrier, which describes itself as “a global source for everything interesting in art, music, fashion, travel, nightlife and cocktail culture.” If you want to know who’s playing this weekend in Dubai, or how to get into a “secret bar” in Moscow, you can find out from this site, which is 100% produced by the company that’s sold fizzy water for more than a century (and in 1992 became part of Nestlé). At least half a dozen staff editors run the site from New York, L.A. and London, and dozens of others contribute on a freelance basis.

To hear the company tell it, Société Perrier is an urgently needed solution to an image problem. Perrier has to “recover its iconic status,” Jorge Torres, marketing group manager for premium brands at Nestle Waters, told me. “It’s a little bit old, and a little bit dusty.” The answer to that problem is usually the same — engage the younger consumer — but if everyone knew how to quench that thirst, Perrier wouldn’t be in this position today. Within the United States, the challenge is even larger, because our tastes are increasingly domestic. While the U.S. continues to be the world’s biggest market by volume for bottled water — and Nestlé the biggest player in it — U.S. sales of imported water are down 44% from their peak in 2004, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation.

Perrier, then, needed to find a way to be both global — where Perrier is still growing — and local. Torres says the site actually grew out of a realization that Perrier was contributing to a number of interesting cultural events and institutions all across the world, and there was no central place to promote them all. Using the marketing budget from the bigger markets to create a platform that could highlight what was happening in places like Sao Paolo or Toronto with fewer resources just made sense. Michael Blatter, whose Mirrorball agency helped strategize the site, says: “Société Perrier has global presence with local activation.” The target, Torres says, is the “social hedonist,” whom Perrier wants to reach at every decision point, including what-should-I-do-tonight?

By James Ledbetter The opinions expressed are his own.

For many years, the River Café, an elegant restaurant that sits just below the Brooklyn Bridge, had a plaque on its wall declaring, in effect, “If you work for General Electric, go eat somewhere else.”

This unusual exclusion policy had a simple explanation: for three decades, two GE plants in upstate New York dumped as much as 1.3 million pounds of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) into the Hudson River, poisoning the fish supply that River Café depends on. The effect that this contamination had on wildlife—and on anyone who ate too much fish caught in the Hudson—was severe enough to create one of the largest Superfund projects in the history of the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Hudson pollution was not unique; the bend of the Housatonic River in Connecticut where I grew up was frequently unswimmable, because of PCBs floating down from a GE plant in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Another aqueous assault, another massive taxpayer-funded cleanup. (Update: A GE spokesman tells me that the company paid for the cleanup of both rivers. Of course, there were also costs to taxpayers, but this is an important distinction.)

Thus, you didn’t have to own a fish restaurant to have a negative opinion of General Electric. Indeed, on the American left in the 1980s, GE was about as comprehensive a corporate bogeyman as could be imagined, and was the target of one of the few anti-corporate documentaries to win an Academy Award. In addition to its overt environmental sins, the company made nuclear power plants. It made nuclear weapons. It was one of the largest military contractors in the country, which made its ownership of a major broadcast network seem disturbing. It paid so little in corporate tax in the 1980s that it apparently offended Ronald Reagan’s sensibilities—and he’d been a GE spokesman!

So it was jarring to read in the Wall Street Journal this week that GE is now a punching bag for the political right. Sarah Palin has charged on her Facebook page that GE has become “the poster child of corporate welfare and crony capitalism.” When Newt Gingrich attacked GE for paying no taxes during the Tea Party-sponsored presidential debate last month, the audience applauded—twice.

What is going on here? How did a venerable left-wing target become an apparently convenient right-wing target?

On August 22, Reuters.com published a video entitled “Twitter through the eye of an artist,” a profile of the New York-based artist Michelle Vaughn. Vaughn is married to Reuters blogger Felix Salmon; although Salmon played no role in producing the video, that relationship should have been disclosed in the video. Reuters apologizes for the omission.

The debate around Steven Brill’s new book “Class Warfare” continues to swirl. A review/essay in Monday’s New York Times by Michael Winerip accused Brill of largely ignoring the views and experiences of teachers. Like some other Brill critics, Winerip accused the book of overstating the success of charter schools, and overallocating blame for failed schools to teachers’ unions where other factors–such as poverty–may be at work.

Brill felt Winerip’s criticism was misguided and had a bit of a personal attack in it. He attempted to post a response Sunday night to the Times‘s Web site. When, Monday morning, that response remained unposted (despite more than a dozen later comments going up), Reuters.com published it. He said it felt “almost as if [Winerip had] been waiting to unload on me for years,” and in turn accused Winerip of not using proper data to understand charter school performance in Harlem.

Then, later Monday morning, the Times site, got around to publishing Brill’s response, and about an hour later, Winerip replied to the reply. You can read that exchange in full here.