It is not a secret that I supported the candidacy of Barack Obama for President, nor that I was overjoyed he won. Overall, I am also happy with his presidency. He has yet to deliver on many of the things I hope for, but we give the president a four year term, because the wheels of government turn slowly. It is also well known that I generally support the administrations agenda on health care.
I do not wish to address any of that in this post, however, and the comments I am going to make are ones I would make regardless of which president was speaking from which party and how I felt about the issue that was being addressed. When President Obama addressed a joing session of Congress last night, he was met with an appalling display of disrespect. The most egregious example of this was the outburst by Rep. Joe Wilson (Rep. S. Carolina. But that was only one example. Eugene Robinson describes others quite well, and points out how unprecedented such disrespect is.
Rep. Louis Gohmert of Texas waved hand-lettered signs at the president, as if he thought he were attending one of those made-for-television town-hall meetings rather than a solemn gathering of the nation’s highest elected officials.
Throughout the speech, there was grumbling, mugging and eye-rolling on the Republican side that was not only undignified but frankly un-American…
Congress didn’t heckle Lyndon Johnson like that during the Vietnam War or Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal. Congress didn’t even show that kind of bitterness and aggression toward George W. Bush, who did lie—specifically, about the intelligence that his administration relied on to justify an unnecessary war that has cost 4,300 American lives and enough money to fund Obama’s health care proposals for a decade.
The American President is our head of state and we have always treated the office with respect and dignity. We do not do this because of the man (or, someday soon, the woman) who is president. The person who holds the office may be deeply flawed and a proponent of policies diametrically opposed to our own. We may even work hard to block his policies and against his re-election.
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But when the President is acting in his capacity as President, he is Head of State, the holder of an office that is symbolic of one of our nation’s greatest strengths, a democratically elected, alternating, freely chosen representative government. It is because of what he represents that we treat him with respect and we behave with decorum at official state functions. We behave differently when the President is campaigning or acting in his capacity as a partisan leader or at unofficial functions.
Soldiers salute the President. Ambassadors and dignataries stand when he walks in the room. Congress gathers in joint session and greets him with ceremony. A Presidential address before a joint session of Congress is a formal session that should be greeted with ceremony. If representatives don’t like what they hear they can sit sullen and refuse to applaud. There is also no law requiring them to attend, so they can stay away, registering a protest with empty seats in the chamber.
But it is NOT acceptable to disrupt a speech. It is bad manners and not behavior most of us want our children to learn. But more than that, it is un-American. When the President of the United States walks into the room, be he President Obama, Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon or any other president past or yet to come, we treat the President with respect!