Tag Archives: Obama

Tod Gitlin Sums It Up

I was going to post about Obama’s speech this morning, but Tod Gitlin has already said it, and said it best.

He sounded like a winner. Like all great preachers, he started methodically and built to crescendos. The Republican responder, Charles Boustany of Louisiana, sounded like a whiner, crying, Deficit, deficit, and government-run, government-run, and built toward nothing. Obama charged the Republicans with specific lies. He made the obligatory gestures toward bipartisanship, including the unexpected shout-out to John McCain, who had campaigned in favor of mandatory catastrophic insurance–and I don’t want to be cynical about those gestures, even though I think he’s naive about the other party’s intentions–but that’s not where his stresses fell. He was reminding the majority who voted for him why they did that. He was reminding independents that the reason why no progress has been made toward universality, mandates, and affordabiity is Republicans–as with 1935’s Social Security and 1965’s Medicare laws. He was reminding them, as well as the few rational Republicans left, that the insurance companies are not the glories of American value.

He did not sound like a patsy. He offered specific programs but the peroration was clear: he stood for values and national character. If he went too easy on the insurance companies for my taste–his audience could have used the information that Americans pay insurance companies twice as much as they pay doctors–he took a proper jab at Republicans (they know who they are) who make up the party of fear. You can say that he’s still not willing to talk to Americans straight about the need to limit high-tech medicine for the very old and very frail. Presidents won’t do that.

But he bet on the strength of the American character. It was his finest public moment since the Inaugural. I’m betting national decency wins.

Hissy Fits

Conflict is a given in democratic systems. Citizens are expected—nay, encouraged–to bring their different value systems, ideas and political preferences into the public square, where we have not only the right but the duty to make our arguments as forcefully and persuasively as we can. Only after we’ve aired the relevant pros and cons in our lively but civil marketplace of ideas do we select the winners in a fair and square, open process. We elect the most persuasive candidate, or we pass (or defeat) the proposed legislation. Everyone gets a say, we have a fair fight, and everyone abides by the result.

 Or so the theory goes.

 Unfortunately, this system only works if everyone plays by the rules, broadly conceived. Another way to put that is the system only works if the participants are grown-ups.

 I can remember when my sons were small. Telling a two-year-old who doesn’t want to share his toy that “time’s up, now it’s Johnny’s turn” would more often than not be met with a tantrum, and screams of “no! mine!” Some of the footage we’ve been seeing on the evening news has reminded me forcefully of those less-than-idyllic moments of motherhood. We see people showing up at Congressional “town halls” with guns, or signs accusing the administration of being “Nazis.” We’ve even seen people biting each other! (Talk about angry toddlers!)

 Now, people are refusing to let their children hear President Obama tell them to study hard and stay in school. (It’s communist indoctrination!)

 There’s no polite way to say this, folks. This is nuts.

 Now, this is the place in the discussion when someone can be counted on to sputter that they “have a right” to say their piece. And they do. I absolutely agree. But just because you have a right to do something doesn’t mean that doing it is appropriate, or helpful, or smart. Name-calling—especially when it is abundantly clear that the person hurling the accusation has no clue what “socialist” or “Nazi” really means—is about as persuasive as a two-year-old’s shriek.

When people on the left called Bush a Nazi, they made it much more difficult for people with principled and very specific concerns to be heard. When people on the right throw hissy fits, they  drown out more thoughtful and reasonable critics, making it easy—if unfair—to dismiss all opposition as unhinged. When we see television clips of people who have gone off the deep end because there is a black family in the White House, it makes it tempting to paint all opposition as racist.

Many of us were dismayed when Bush won in 2004, but he was elected, he was the President and we had to suck it up and live with it. We made our arguments, we registered our protests and we waited for the next election. It’s time for these rabid Obama haters to grow up and do the same.

You win some, you lose some. It’s called democracy.

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