|
Look, even though many conservatives are racist hogs, along with their other faults, bellyaching about arrogance at the summit isn't necessarily coded racism. Lest we forget, crying "racism" at every criticism of the President HURTS our cause and feeds the fire of leftist excuse-making.
Obama's performance at the summit was really good, given the basic premise that we're only going to try for watered-down corporatism and insurance enabling. That's another argument, and my views are well recorded on the subject. Given the impasse of the moment, he stood his ground and worked them over good and proper without being demeaning or professorial or anything of the sort.
I personally think it was a completely unintended dynamic of his endearing folksiness to have the seeming disrespect of calling them by their first names and having them properly address him as "Mr. President". It's one of those things that one doesn't really realize the effect of until it occurs in the open for a prolonged period of time. This was that time, and I'll bet that next time around, he won't do the same thing. Sadly, it can be construed as rubbing their noses in their obviously lower rung on the ladder, and that, coupled with the command performance flavor of the thing, gave the reactionaries ammunition they needed: they need ANYTHING to distract from the true subject matter of our health care crisis, and this gives them another bit of grist for their self-pity mill.
Here's something people on this board need to accept: when one is in an enviable position of great power, one is going to take lots of crap from many quarters. It's human nature. Shrieking with outrage and claiming coded "uppitiness" at every turn just makes us seem juvenile and silly.
It was an unfortunate bit of theatre in what was otherwise a fine--if still rather timid--confrontation, and ANYTHING that allows the trogs to deflect attention from their blinkered, selfish corporate greed is a mistake on our part. Hopefully we'll learn, but for us to stamp our little feet and throw a tantrum about how unfair it all is just throws more fuel onto the fire that WE CREATED BY MAKING A TACTICAL BLUNDER OF SHOWMANSHIP.
We hold our elected officials to high standards and we should. If we're going to take on entrenched interest, we'd damned well be pretty nigh perfect. Instead of sniveling about it, we should learn and accept the mistake for what it was.
Once again, we should use the acid test of the "unfairness" argument: how would we have responded had George W. Bush done the same thing? (Okay, he probably would have had nicknames for the Senators and Representatives, but I think you get my point: people here would have been frothing with dudgeon and playing to the cheap seats.) Let's learn from this and move on.
Even with this bit of a blot, this was a rather successful event, and Obama did quite well.
|