Is Barack Obama the last liberal president? In I Am the Change, Charles Kesler, a leading conservative scholar, educator, and journalist, offers a sophisticated analysis of the president’s political thought, based on Obama’s own words and writings, to demonstrate that he represents either a new birth of liberalism…or its demise. Kesler’s writing is a potent mixture of philosophy, journalism, psychology, and history—seasoned with a delightful, razor-sharp wit—as he takes a greatly underestimated chief executive seriously and explores American liberalism in crisis.

Who is Barack Obama? Even after his reelection, many Americans wonder what he really believes. Charles R. Kesler argues that both liberals and conservatives underestimate the scope of Obama's political ambition and the long-term stakes for which he is playing.

I Am the Change tries to understand Obama as he understands himself, based largely on his own writings, speeches, and interviews. Kesler, a leading conservative scholar, educator, and journalist, takes Obama seriously as an intelligent and thoughtful progressive who is intent on reinvigorating the liberal faith and leading it to a new political preeminence—but who fails to understand the contradictions and crises, both fiscal and philosophical, toward which he is rushing.

Will Obama save liberalism and become its fourth great incarnation, following Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson? Or will the movement be derailed by his very successes? These are the questions at the heart of Kesler's indispensable guide to the past, and the future, of American liberalism.

"Kesler is the reader for whom Obama has long been asking, in the sense of 'asking for it', and this book is the examination of the One we've been waiting for."