Last week, President Barack Obama addressed Congress on health care reform and was rudely interrupted by Republican Congressman Joe Wilson from South Carolina.
Congressman Wilson, demonstrating an Oscar-caliber performance of an 11-year-old child, emphatically yelled, “You lie,” after Obama stated that his health care proposal did not provide benefits for illegal immigrants.
The outburst served not only as a new low in the national debate regarding health care, but also was a direct challenge — or questioning — of the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency.
An hour after his outburst, Wilson apologized for his lack of civility.
“This evening I let my emotions get the best of me when listening to the president’s remarks regarding the coverage of illegal immigrants in the health care bill.”
Wilson’s apology was mere protocol and most likely easy because the congressman knew his constituency back home was in full support of his patriotic act of defiance.
“I’m proud if him, Washington has been getting away with lies for too long … It’s time we have people like Joe Wilson stand up,” said Jake Knotts, a 64-year-old Republican state senator whose district overlaps Wilson’s.
Wilson’s deliberate disturbance in the legislative chamber was not about emotions. If Obama’s skin color were white, that outburst would have never occurred.
For me personally, as a sports fan, the congressman’s outburst evoked memories of the late Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball in 1947. Racist fans felt that Robinson did not have the legitimate right to be on the same field as white players, and they verbally reminded him of that.
What incensed Congressman Wilson so badly that he could not control himself and needed to call Obama a liar during an address to Congress? Wilson has been involved in politics from a young age and worked as an aide to the notoriously racist late-Sen. Strom Thurmond. Surely, Thurmond showed his young apprentice Wilson the proper mannerisms for the legislative chamber.
The Washington Post summarized Wilson’s actions accurately: “There is something appalling about the display on the House floor for what was supposed to be a sacred ritual of American democracy: the nation watching while Cabinet members, lawmakers from both chambers and the diplomatic corps assembled.”
The phrase, “I feel like I don’t recognize my country anymore,” the plaintive cry of conservatives in the Obama era, is heard frequently nowadays. The mainstream media, which only showed health care town halls if loud, obnoxious protesters interrupted them, is happy to broadcast, thereby feeding this dynamic.
The United States has had liberal presidents before, but they have not inspired the venom with which Wilson and the “town hall-ers” are seething about.
Conservative media and talk radio, no longer content to merely insinuate that the president is a socialist Muslim/Kenyan, and that he is “palling around with terrorists,” now analyze the president’s “deep seated hatred for white people.”
By using the great dilemma of health care, the Republican Party is successfully dragging the national discourse of the debate to shockingly low-levels in terms of civility and honesty. This downgrade in communication facilitates the idea that President Obama is “the other,” therefore unknown and “unlike us.”
Toward the end of Obama’s speech he directed a fitting rebuke at the sort of behavior Wilson had exhibited earlier.
“When we can no longer engage in civil conversation with each other over things that truly matter, we don’t merely lose our ability to solve big challenges,” Obama said. “We lose something essential about ourselves.”
Hanif Zarrabi is a Middle Eastern History graduate student and a columnist for the Daily 49er.