President Barack Obama, his Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are all guilty of committing the sin of political incorrectness.
The President, for a second time since being elected, took what some see as a swipe at the city of Las Vegas, admonishing parents not to spend their children’s college fund on a vacation to Las Vegas. As a President-elect, in the depths of the financial meltdown, Obama suggested that business leaders might want to think twice about expensive conventions and meetings in Las Vegas.
Rahm Emanuel, a fiery rhetorician (I’m being as politically correct as possible here), speaking in a private, behind-closed-door meeting, referred to something with which he obviously disagreed as “f…… retarded.” This brought a firestorm of criticism and a call for Emanuel’s firing from no less a voice than former Alaska Governor and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, the mother of a child with Down Syndrome.
Sen. Reid, quoted in a book about the 2008 presidential campaign, now famously intoned that then candidate Obama was a viable presidential candidate because he was a “light skinned African American who didn’t speak with a Negro dialect, unless he wanted to.” People called that remark both insensitive and racist.
In the 24-hour news cycle that constitutes journalism these days, all of these transgressions are both legitimate stories and causes for immediate and passionate retaliation. What they do is inflame divisiveness which is already at a fever pitch in the lala-land that is American politics in the 21st century.
Add to these “outbursts” the President’s never-before-seen repudiation of a recent Supreme Court decision on campaign financing during his State of the Union address, as well as South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson’s public “You lie!” outburst directed at the President during a nationally-televised address to a joint session of Congress, and one can easily come away with the belief that the words people in power speak are easily as important and significant as the deeds they do.
Words matter. Definitely, words matter. But let’s keep all of these and other verbal lapses of judgment in perspective. While they may sting, they don’t hold a candle to bad actions and deeds (insert Gov. Sanford, Tiger Woods, et. al. here) that cause real and lasting damage.