Who's Your Daddy?

In her Jan. 9th 2010 column entitled, “Captain Obvious Learns the Limits of Cool,” Maureen Dowd writes something I would like to comment on. Once again, and as so often in recent years, we meet the language of the Papa Bear State, a concept I have been snorting at and stamping against for some time now. Et tu, MoDo, et tu! Then fall, Blogging Dino. (Cue heavy thud just short of impact tremor. Impact tremors are reserved for T-Rex.) We are told towards the end of the column, if I understand rightly, that President Obama, in supposedly failing to respond quickly and passionately enough to the Christmas-day near miss over Detroit, has squandered his opportunity “to be the strong father who protects the home from invaders” and who “reassures and instructs” Americans when danger threatens or disaster strikes.

The second formulation may encapsulate a reasonable expectation, but the first is unfortunate. The president is an intelligent and capable man, and I am glad I voted for him. “That hope and change thing” is still working out for me, thank you. But “strong father”? He is no more than a few years my senior, and probably several years the junior of many people reading or contributing to this blog. I didn’t vote for a National Father last November; I voted for the individual I hoped would become the 44th POTUS. What I like about Barack Obama is precisely that he seems intent on rejecting the “papafication” of the presidency, even though he can hardly be said to have diminished the powers of the office in his one year at the helm. In short, he tends to speak to the citizenry as if they were rational adults. That’s a risk, of course, because a disturbing number of Americans become terrified for their skins quicker than you can say “exploding underwear.” But I give Obama credit for taking the risk, and I find his allegedly too-aloof way of dealing with crises preferable to the tendencies of the previous administration.

Employing the language of the Daddy State, in the long run, only encourages the brutes who deny the wisdom of Ben Franklin’s dictum, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety” (Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin, London: Henry Colburn, 1818. 270; Franklin places the sentence in quotation marks.) The president may be the most powerful individual on the planet, and he is undeniably invested with a great deal of symbolic value; he bears some responsibility, most of us would probably agree, for keeping the country as safe as it can be while still observing the constitution he swore to uphold. He is not, however—and apparently does not want to be—“Our Father, Who Lives on Pennsylvania Avenue.” Never mind “the limits of cool”: the discursive limits or boundaries that President Obama takes into account are those required to maintain a healthy relationship between a republican citizenry and the individual they have chosen for a time to serve as their highest official.

So please, call the honorable Mr. Obama a clean and articulate communo-fascist Kenyan Muslim terrorist-fist-bumping negro-dialect-free granny-killer if you must, but not “Daddy.” We have enough outlandish descriptions for Barack already, and there is little doubt the pie will be made still higher in coming years. It's Permanent Silly-Season Revolution for this man's opponents, and evidently even some of his well-meaning supporters can't help playing the useful idiot from time to time. I will just go with “President Obama.” Simple. Dignified. Even a dinosaur can roll with that....