Barack Obama – Page 23

A telegenic appointment

When I heard about the apparent appointment of television doc Sanjay Gupta as surgeon general, I was immediately taken back to his treatment of Michael Moore and Moore’s film Sicko during an appearance on CNN two years ago.

Paul Krugman also remembers what he calls the “mugging” of Moore:

You don’t have to like Moore or his film; but Gupta specifically claimed that Moore “fudged his facts”, when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong.

What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he’s uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right. It’s sort of a minor-league version of the way people who pointed out in real time that Bush was misleading us into war are to this day considered less “serious” than people who waited until it was fashionable to reach that conclusion. And appointing Gupta now, although it’s a small thing, is just another example of the lack of accountability that always seems to be the rule when you get things wrong in a socially acceptable way.

You can watch the exchange between Moore and Gupta here.

What does this say about Gupta as an advocate for healthcare reform? Hard to say — reading the transcript left me somewhat befuddled as to Gupta’s position. Things don’t work and it’s a shame that there are so many uninsured Americans, but no one has a good plan and.. and… You get the point.

In the end, the rumor raises some troubling questions — again — about where Barack Obama is heading as he enters his presidency. After peopling his cabinet with Clintonites and the kind of insiders acceptible to the powers that be, one has to wonder how aggressively he will push back and whether he will show the commitment to social and economic change necessary to drag us out of this mess, whether he is willing to ignore conventional wisdom and be as bold as he needs to be.

We will begin learning the answer to those questions in 13 days.

Platform for intolerance

Alfred Doblin’s column in The Record on Friday — ‘Blazing Saddles’ to Saddleback to ‘Brokeback’ — takes the convenient lie that too many supporters of Barack Obama have been telling themselves lately to convince themselves that the president-elect’s selection of the Rev. Rick Warren to give the invocation at the inaugural doesn’t matter.

It does — and for one very good reason:

Obama is giving a platform to someone who worked to strip a civil right — marriage from same-sex couples in California. Warren was not stating a theological difference from the pulpit; he supported changing a California law so that some Californians would be less equal than others. There is nothing more anti-American than taking away an existing civil liberty.

The decision, he says, does not cast the president-elect in a good light:

Obama is not an enemy of gay people, but that does not make him a friend.

The end of the malaprop administration

I’ve been thinking about Barack Obama’s decision to have a poet read at his inaugural — about what it means for language and the nation (and not so much about the poet, Elizabeth Alexander, whose work I unfortunately have not read) but was having some difficulty putting it into words. I think this comment from Christian Wiman, the editor of Poetry magazine, in The New York Times sums it up best:

“After eight years of mangled and manipulated language, and the palpable effects of that in the real world, it seems like any gesture toward clarity of expression and dignity of life is welcome,” Christian Wiman, the editor of Poetry magazine, said in an e-mail message.

“In a way, the poem itself is not the point,” Mr. Wiman added. “I would guess that a president-elect decides to have an inaugural poem in the first place not in the hope of commissioning some eternal work of art, but in order to acknowledge that there is an intimate, inevitable connection between a culture’s language and its political life. That Obama wants to make such a gesture seems to me a pure good — for poetry, yes, but also for the country.”

Will Obama set a new table?

The nation’s agricultural and food policies are stuck in the past — the 19th century, to be exact — and food activists are hoping the new president will change the way the nation eats and farms, bringing the United States into the 21st century.

It remains an open question, however, whether he will.

Although Mr. Obama has proposed changes in the nation’s farm and rural policies and emphasizes the connection between diet and health, there is nothing to indicate he has a special interest in a radical makeover of the way food is grown and sold.

Still, the dream endures. To advocates who have watched scattered calls for changes in food policy gather political and popular momentum, Mr. Obama looks like their kind of president.

Not only does he seem to possess a more-sophisticated palate than some of his recent predecessors, but he will also take office in an age when organic food is mainstream, cooking competitions are among the top-rated TV shows and books calling for an overhaul in the American food system are best sellers.

“People are so interested in a massive change in food and agriculture that they are dining out on hope now. That is like the main ingredient,” said Eddie Gehman Kohan, a blogger from Los Angeles who started Obamafoodorama.com to document just about any conceivable link between Mr. Obama and food, whether it is a debate on agriculture policy or an image of Mr. Obama rendered in tiny cupcakes.

“He is the first president who might actually have eaten organic food, or at least eats out at great restaurants,” Ms. Gehman Kohan said.

Still, no one is sure just how serious Mr. Obama really is about the politics of food. So like mystery buffs studying the book jacket of “The Da Vinci Code,” interested eaters dissect every aspect of his life as it relates to the plate.

The reality, as with everything else surrounding the president-elect, is that progressives may be projecting their own desires onto him, leaving far more room for disappointment than there should be.

The LGBT movement is (rightly) angry over the choice of the Rev. Rick Warren to give the invocation at the inauguration. Economic populists — like me — are none too pleased with the economic team he’s assembled, peace activists are angry over his retention of Robert Gates as defense secretary (not to mention their puzzlement over the choice of Hillary Clinton for secretary of state), and so on.

None of this should have been a surprise — as I’ve written and so many on the left have said, Barack Obama is a cautious political centrist, albeit one with progressive instincts that have been lacking among most Democrats in recent years.

I remain hopeful that Obama will move the nation in a more humane and reformist direction, even if he does not take us as far toward social democracy as I would like.

Readers discuss same-sex marriage

I thought it might be interesting to offer the responses we received to our editorial on same-sex marriage — the responses come from the South Brunswick Post and The Princeton Packet.

Stan, Dec. 18:

Same sex “marriage” violates the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. These people know where they’re going.

Dennis C. McGrath, Dec. 18:

Yes, I do know where I’m going. To the courthouse, to be civilly married and have my full rights as a citizen restored. Whatever you imagine your god to be or to care about is of no consequence to me, and of no legal standing. Sorry, Stan.

cav, Dec. 19:

Stan is quite the closed minded bigot. He’s living back in the 1950s when it was OK to vent your hatred for gays with impunity and to beat them up without worry of any consequences. Beating a gay to a pulp was sport and fun for the hate mongers.

Notstan, Dec. 20:

Stan is obviously a time traveler from 1843, how quaint. Laws of nature? Hate to burst his bubble but homosexuality does exist in nature.Homosexual and bisexual behavior are widespread in the animal kingdom: a 1999 review by researcher Bruce Bagemihl shows that homosexual behavior, has been observed in close to 1500 species, ranging from primates to gut worms, and is well documented for 500 of them.

taylor, Dec. 21:

Like President Elect Obama, I don’t believe marriage should be made legal between a man and a man or a woman and a woman. Why am I called a bigot, but Obama is given a pass? Hmmmm, interesting double standard, to be sure. Why aren’t gay groups picketing TODAY outside his multio million dollar mansion in Chicago? What a joke.

Rob, Dec. 22:

taylor, the LGBT community is doing what it can in seeking President-Elect Obama’s support. As you may have heard here’s a busy man, and picketing outside his mansion in Chicago is not the way to reach him.Obama’s support at the moment means, on a federal level, once he is sworn into office, to fulfill his campaign promises to repeal DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act which makes it so that legal same-sex marriages recognized in MA and CT do not need to be recognized by other states, nor does the federal government need to recognize them) and DADT (Don’t Ask Don’t Tell). He has already said that repealing DADT will be a delayed action because, well, there’s the whole economy thing to deal with. You being called a bigot is unfortunate, but regardless of you being labeled as such, I am curious why you feel that marriage should not be made legal between two persons of the same gender, and invite you to either respond to my comment or to e-mail me.

I find the debate here interesting — more for the sense of victimhood being offered by the defenders of so-called “traditional marriage” than for any real discussion of the issue.

I do think it important to add — in response to taylor — that the LGBT community is protesting Obama’s choice of the Rev. Rick Warren of the author of “The Purpose Driven Life” and the conservative evangelical pastor of the Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif., to give the invocation at the inaugural. So no, Obama is not getting a pass from the LGBT community.