Last night, I watched Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress, streamed live on Hulu (which is a great thing that they offer). Listening to it, when Obama got to the part of his speech where he said that his healthcare reform would not cover illegal immigrants, one could clearly hear one man yell, "You lie!" at the President. This causes a small furor that (luckily) quickly quieted down, as Obama merely repeats, "that's not true" to the accusation that illegal immigrants would be covered - this was even covered briefly by the AP.
However, it got me thinking about what the role of heckling in the American Parliament, and what the role of the President is in this country. This is not Parliament in London where "Prime Minister's Questions" is a time period that is usually shown on the highlights reel of the news, especially when spoken gaffes are made:
Yet, I don't think that even in this apparent free-for-all of questions and shouting that people would stand up and call the PM (or any other MP) a liar (at least not directly, perhaps choosing to couch the language a little more carefully to a single topic or to only shout something like that when it could be drowned out by all the other hecklers).
However, the United States is not the UK, and the leader of the country isn't another (but greatly more powerful) member of parliament. The President's Executive Branch of government is an equal and separate arm of government (which has different powers than the Legislature). Here, there is a tradition of decorum, of clapping or cheering with agreement, or not clapping when you disagreed. Even in parliamentary proceedings, the normal process is much more staid.
Representative Joe Wilson was approached by many members of his Republican party and told to apologize to the President, which he did. His statement was, "While I disagree with the president’s statement, my comments were inappropriate and regrettable," and this apology is a good thing. True, one way to think about this was that it was a political apology, either to try an save his re-election ability, or his ability to work with others in Congress in the future.
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We were all told to, "respect the office" of the President during the presidency of George W. Bush. We were told that protesting against the President was "anti-American" or "anti-patriotic". Yet now many of those who said that it was anti-American to protest the President are protesting the President - and going to much further an extent than many of the protests against George W. Bush did, including outright lies; paranoid statements about how government has suddenly turned into an ominously insidious body that secretly tries to kill and marginalize its citizens; single-minded ad hominem attacks by equating the President with dictators of the past; etc.
Just two days prior to the 9/9/09 speech to Congrss, President Barack Obama gave a day-after-Labor Day (i.e., the first day of school) speech to school children. And leading up to it, the paranoid calls from anti-Obama arenas erupted in full non-respect of the office. Where were those members from the right who so vociferously stated things like, "respect the office"? Jon Beilue at amarillo.com asks this question in his column, asking how we can find our way back to more decorum. It was - in some ways - a column that strangely foreshadowed the outburst from Rep. Wilson just later that night.
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