Barack Obama and the moral imperative

I finally got around to listen to a podcast of Bill Moyers’ Journal from this past weekend and thought this exchange with Princeton University professor, Melissa Harris-Lacewll, was interesting and explained a lot about what will need to happen if progressives are to have influence over an Obama administration:

BILL MOYERS: You mentioned policy ills. And this gets me to the question of governance. So what do you, as progressives, as liberals, what do you expect of him that will fulfill your hopes for him, beyond the symbolism into the actual world of policy and decision making?

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: One of the images I’ve been using as we’ve been going around the country trying to place the King holiday in the context of a new Obama era is I’ve been using the image, iconic image of Barack Obama excuse me. Ah! Of Martin Luther King…

BILL MOYERS: There you go.

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Right. Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson together in the White House. And I say to people, okay, where’s — if you can superimpose Barack Obama’s face onto one of these two characters, onto whose face would you project it? And most people say, “Oh, well, King.” And I say, “No, no, no, no. Barack Obama’s LBJ in this picture.”

We’ve elected him to the U.S. presidency. So the missing image is who will play the role of King? Because, in fact, the president needs Kings. I actually think it’s plural. It’s not a single King. But the myth-

BILL MOYERS: You mean that they need agitators out there-

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: That’s-

BILL MOYERS: -who are pressing them to do the right thing-

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: That’s exactly right.

BILL MOYERS: -as Lyndon Johnson said to Martin Luther King — go out there and make it possible for me to do the right thing.

Basically, it comes down to the idea that it is the people in this democracy who are responsible for pushing their elected representatives to act. That’s why I chafe at the use of the word leader when referring to the president and Congress. They must show leadership, I guess, but it is more important that they follow the imperatives laid down by the masses.

Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet