SALON

Tuesday, Jan 22, 2013 12:42 AM UTC

Check your optimism

Before progressives get swept up in Obama fervor -- again -- some sober reminders about promises and "name-calling"

By

Topics: Barack Obama, 2013 inauguration, LGBT, Liberals, Progressives, Rahm Emanuel,

Check your optimism

In an inaugural speech stringing together the most tried, true and poll-tested applause lines, none was as appropriate yet also dissonant as President Obama’s assertion that America should not “treat name-calling as reasoned debate.”

On the appropriate side of the ledger, that line could be seen as a justifiable riposte to an Angry Right-Wing Hate Machine that relies on – and makes its money from – the business of slur. Indeed, epithets like “socialist,” “fascist,” “Hitler,” “Magical Negro,” and “monkey” (among others) are now part of the conservative movement’s day-to-day vernacular in making its case against the current White House occupant, ginning up popular anger and raising money for the conservative media machine.

However, after a speech that resurrected the themes he ran on in 2008 by rhetorically celebrating a progressive agenda, the president’s rejoinder against “name calling” seems to contradict his own deportment, considering how often his administration employs such name calling to berate the progressive movement.

It was, for instance, Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who berated liberals as “fucking retarded” for daring to try to press congressional Democrats to back the health care promises Obama himself made.
It was Obama who deployed his official spokesman to tell reporters that liberals working to hold the president to his campaign promises “ought to be drug tested” because they are “crazy.”

It was Obama’s reelection campaign that sent out an email slamming Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman as a “political rookie” and hammering liberal health care activists as the “Firebagger Lefty blogosphere.”

It was a “Democrat close to Obama” who used an interview with Politico to castigate LGBT activists as “naive” for daring to push the president to support basic equality under the law.

It was an Obama adviser who denigrated liberals as the “internet left fringe” and who implored progressives “to take off their pajamas” just because they expected the president to actually advocate for the policies he promised to during his election campaign.

It was a “senior Obama adviser” who labeled those supporting a public health-care merely “the left of the left.”

It was an anonymous confidante of Obama’s national security adviser who slammed civil libertarians questioning the president’s extra-judicial drone war as “Cheeto-eating people in the basement working in their underwear.”

The list goes on and on – these are just a representative sample of a White House that often seems as eager to utilize obnoxious fact-free invective against progressives as the Angry Right-Wing Hate Machine. That invective may be a bit less harsh and offensive, but it is still exactly the kind of “name calling” the president deplored in his speech.

But, then, perhaps that is the real meaning of Obama’s applause line about “name calling”. Perhaps it was both a justifiable and easy-to-understand “fuck you” to the right and also a more subtle pledge to the millions of liberals and progressives who put him in the White House. Perhaps, in short, it was a president who has previously asked citizens to “hold me accountable” now pledging to strike a wholly different and more constructive posture toward those progressives who do just that.

That may be wishful thinking. But on an inauguration day that quadrennially begs us to feel some twinge of aspirational optimism, that should be least we can hope for from a man whose original vision was about far bigger hopes and dreams.

David Sirota

David Sirota is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, magazine journalist and the best-selling author of the books "Hostile Takeover," "The Uprising" and "Back to Our Future." E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More David Sirota.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 89 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: Chekhov's story mirrors Russia's own

Recommendations