When you think about unrepentant progressive singer-songwriters, you think of Louie Ludwig, at least locally.

The portrait which graces the cover of his latest disc, a smiling President Barack Obama in front of a giant American flag, isn’t the least bit ironic, and neither is the peace sign he’s flashing. Whether you like Ludwig is going to depend largely on how much you like our current commander-in-chief, though he provided a helpful guide in the liner notes, tagging his polemics

Allmusic style, so that while “Let’s All Hate on the Hipsters” is “folk,” “blues,” and “cheese,” a brief experiment like “The World Is Going Down” is merely “dark” and “odd.”

Actually, dark, odd, cheesy folk/blues is a pretty good catch-all descriptor of Ludwig’s modus operandi, but his muse is so schizophrenic it can dull the effect of his powerful words: “Hipster” is a sharply ironic look at NOLA’s reaction to its new post-K boho strain, the punchline being “They’re helpful and polite / they’re so well-read and bright / they’re the kind of folks that we don’t want around,” but it sits oddly between the foreboding prophecies of “The Reservation” and “Underground.”

And there’s a third Ludwig here, probably the best of the bunch, the guy who draws personal, small-scale, unguarded portraits of love and its own internal wars on “Pony Girl,” “New York Apartment” and the swamp pop of “Feeling’s Got too Strong.” Liberals listening for dog whistles can escape instead to “Another Universe,” where JFK ends ‘Nam, Reagan gets AIDS, and Madonna crashes the stage at the Beatles concert.

U mad?